Skip to content

Convert an image to text

Pull the text out of a photo, a scan or a screenshot and copy it. Recognition happens in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

Your image

Drop an image with text

JPG, PNG, WEBP or HEIC

Options

Language of the text

Telling it the language makes a real difference — it decides which accents and which words to expect.

Add an image to get started.

Why use this tool

  • No file size limit

    Full-size photos straight from your phone or camera.

  • Nothing is uploaded

    Processed entirely in your browser. Your files never leave your device.

  • No signup needed

    Open the tool and go. No account, no email.

Text trapped inside an image cannot be searched, corrected or pasted. A photographed invoice, a screenshot of an error message, a page of a book, a sign photographed abroad: the information is right there, and yet retyping it is the only way to use it.

Optical character recognition — OCR — reads those shapes and gives back words. This tool runs an OCR engine directly in your browser, hands the text back in a box you can edit, and puts it on the clipboard in one click.

How to extract text from an image

  1. Drop in your image

    A photo, a scan or a screenshot: JPG, PNG, WEBP and HEIC all work, including pictures straight from an iPhone.

  2. Choose the language of the text

    This is the step that matters most. It tells the engine which accents and which vocabulary to expect, and it makes far fewer mistakes.

  3. Copy the result

    The text appears in a box you can correct before copying it, or download as a .txt file.

Telling it the language changes everything

An OCR engine does not guess at isolated letters: it weighs what it sees against what it knows of a language. Without being told, é becomes e, ñ becomes n, and accented words degrade one at a time.

So the picker is set to the language of the page you are reading, and seven languages are offered. For text in another language, change it before you read — it is the single setting that makes the biggest difference to the result.

The first read in a language downloads its data, between 0.6 and 2.4 MB depending on the language. After that it stays in the browser and later reads start immediately.

What reads well, and what resists

Printed, sharp text reads very well: scanned documents, screenshots, book pages, invoices and receipts photographed flat in decent light. On that kind of image recognition is faithful, accents included.

What resists: handwriting, which no conventional OCR engine reads reliably; blurred or angled photos; white text on a dark background or sitting over a photograph; and heavily decorative typefaces.

The confidence score shown beside the result is the engine's own opinion of its reading. Below roughly 80%, read it over: that usually means a sharper or straighter photo would do much better.

Nothing is uploaded

The OCR engine and its language data are served by this site and run in your browser. Your image never reaches a server, and neither does the text that comes out of it.

That matters more than usual here. The images people put through OCR are rarely trivial: invoices, payslips, letters from an authority, prescriptions, identity documents. Those are exactly the papers not worth handing to a stranger's server to be read.

So there is no account, no queue and no daily limit, and the page keeps working if your connection drops after it has loaded.

What OCR reads best

What to expect from the image you give it.

Kind of imageExpected resultWhat helps
Scan or screenshotExcellent, accents includedNothing in particular
Photo of a flat documentGood when sharp and litShoot square on, avoid shadows
HandwritingUnreliableRetyping is still faster

When people convert an image to text

  • A photographed invoice or receipt

    Amounts and references recovered without retyping them into a spreadsheet.

  • A screenshot of an error

    An error message made copyable, to paste into a search or a support ticket.

  • A book page or scanned document

    A passage extracted to quote, translate or keep as text.

  • A sign or label while travelling

    Text photographed and then pasted into a translator.

Frequently asked questions

Is this image to text converter free?
Yes, completely: no account, no signup, no watermark and no daily limit. Everything runs on your own device, so there are no processing costs to pass on.
Is my image uploaded to a server?
No. The OCR engine runs in your browser; neither the image nor the extracted text ever leaves your device.
Which languages can it read?
Seven: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish. Choose the one the text is in before reading.
Does OCR read handwriting?
Not reliably. The engine is trained on printed text, so a handwritten note gives an approximate result, when it gives one at all.
Why does the result contain mistakes?
Usually because the photo is blurred, angled or dark, or because the chosen language is wrong. The confidence score beside the text says how sure the engine is.
Can I extract text from a PDF?
Not here — this tool reads images. Export the page as an image, or screenshot it, then drop that in.
Is the formatting kept?
No, the result is plain text: line breaks are kept, but fonts, tables and columns are not.
Can I correct the text before copying it?
Yes, the result box is editable. Fix a misread character and copy — faster than redoing it somewhere else.
Do I need to install anything?
No. It runs in the tab you already have open, on a phone or a computer.

More image tools

All image tools

Popular conversions

All image tools

PDF tools

All PDF tools