Image to Text (OCR)
Extract text from any image instantly. Drop a screenshot, scan, or photo — the text comes out ready to copy or download. 12 languages, nothing uploaded.
Drop an image to extract text
JPG, PNG, WebP, BMP, TIFF — or paste with Ctrl+V
or paste an image with Ctrl+V / ⌘V
Your image is processed locally. Nothing is uploaded.
How to use Image to Text (OCR)
- 1
Choose your language
Select the language of the text in your image. English is selected by default. 12 languages are supported including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and more.
- 2
Drop or paste your image
Drop a JPG, PNG, WebP or BMP file onto the tool, click to select, or paste directly with Ctrl+V / ⌘V. The OCR engine starts automatically.
- 3
Wait for recognition
The first use downloads the language data (~4 MB) once. After that, recognition is instant from local cache. The engine reads the text and shows a confidence score.
- 4
Copy or download the result
Edit the extracted text if needed, then copy it to your clipboard or download as a .txt file.
What is OCR and why does it matter
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition — the process of reading text from an image and turning it into editable characters. It is one of the most practically useful things you can do with an image. Screenshots of error messages, scanned receipts, photos of signs, exported PDF pages, text inside old documents — any time there is text trapped inside a raster image, OCR sets it free. This tool uses the Tesseract engine, the most widely deployed open-source OCR system in the world, running entirely inside your browser via WebAssembly.
What works well
Tesseract performs best on printed text with clear contrast between the text and background. Screenshots are ideal — the text is rendered at screen resolution with crisp edges and consistent spacing. Scanned documents work well when the scan is clean and straight. Photos of signs, menus, or product packaging work when the image is sharp and well-lit. Typed documents, invoices, and forms are reliable sources. The higher the image resolution and the cleaner the background, the higher the confidence score will be.
What to do when confidence is low
If the confidence score is below 50%, try cropping the image to contain only the text you want, increasing contrast with the Adjust Image tool before running OCR, or checking that you have selected the correct language. Very small text, stylized fonts, handwriting, and diagonal or curved text all reduce accuracy. For handwriting specifically, no general-purpose OCR engine performs reliably — the results will vary widely depending on legibility.
12 supported languages
The language data for each language is downloaded the first time you select it and cached locally. English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese and Korean are available. For multilingual documents, the best approach is to run the image through the dominant language first, then re-run with another language for sections that did not recognise correctly.