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Extract Text From an Image (OCR) — Free Online

Extract the readable text from a photo, screenshot, or scanned image using optical character recognition (OCR).

How to image to text

  1. Choose an image file containing text (a photo, scan, or screenshot).
  2. Click "Extract Text" and wait for OCR to finish — progress is shown as a percentage.
  3. Copy the recognized text to your clipboard or download it as a .txt file.

Frequently asked questions

How accurate is the text recognition?

Accuracy depends on image clarity — clean, high-contrast, well-lit text recognizes best; blurry or handwritten text is less reliable.

What languages are supported?

The current OCR engine is tuned for English text.

Is my image uploaded to a server for OCR?

The image itself stays in your browser and is recognized on your device. The first run does download the open-source OCR engine and its English language data from a public CDN, which is program data — not your image.

Why is the first run slower than later ones?

The OCR engine and language model are fetched once, then cached by your browser. After that, recognition starts much faster.

How do I get the best accuracy from a photo?

Shoot or crop tightly around the text, keep the page flat and evenly lit, avoid shadows and glare, and hold the camera square to the page. High-contrast printed text recognizes far better than handwriting or low-resolution screenshots.

Can I extract text from a PDF with this?

This tool takes image files. For a scanned PDF, convert the pages to images first with PDF to JPEG, then run those images through OCR here.

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