Explore Tools

Image to Text (OCR)

Extract readable text from a photo or screenshot — free, in your browser.

Drag & drop an image, or click to browse

Extracted text will appear here.

What Is OCR?

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) reads the text visible in an image and converts it into actual, editable, copyable text — useful for pulling a quote out of a screenshot, digitizing a printed page, or grabbing text from a photo of a sign or document without retyping it. This tool runs a WebAssembly build of the open-source Tesseract OCR engine directly in your browser, downloading a small language model the first time you use it and caching it locally for every future extraction.

How to Use This Tool

  1. 1Upload your imageA clear photo, scan, or screenshot containing text.
  2. 2Pick the text's languageAccuracy depends on selecting the right language for the text.
  3. 3Click Extract TextThe first run downloads a small language model — this only happens once per language.
  4. 4Copy or download the resultEdit it directly in the text box if anything needs fixing.

Common Reasons People Reach for OCR

  • Pulling a quote or a paragraph out of a screenshot instead of retyping it by hand.
  • Digitizing a printed page, an old document, or handwritten-looking printed notes into searchable, editable text.
  • Extracting text from a photo of a whiteboard, sign, or receipt taken on the go.
  • Copying text out of an image where the original source file (a PDF, a design file) isn't available anymore.

Good to Know

  • Higher-resolution, well-lit, and flat (non-angled) images produce far more accurate results — a blurry or heavily skewed photo will have more recognition errors.
  • The extracted text isn't always perfect — always proofread the result, especially for names, numbers, and unusual formatting.
  • This works entirely offline after the first run for a given language, since the recognition model is cached in your browser.
  • A tightly cropped photo of just the text block (rather than the whole page with lots of surrounding background) usually recognizes faster and more accurately.
  • Nothing is uploaded — recognition runs entirely in your browser using a WebAssembly OCR engine.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did the first extraction take longer than expected?

The OCR engine downloads a small trained-data file for your chosen language the first time you use it (a few megabytes) — after that, it's cached in your browser and subsequent extractions are much faster.

How accurate is the extracted text?

It depends heavily on image quality — clean, high-contrast, well-lit text recognizes very well, while handwriting, unusual fonts, or low-resolution photos will have more errors. Always review the result.

Can it read handwriting?

It's built for printed/typed text and works poorly on handwriting, which needs a different kind of recognition model entirely.

What languages are supported?

English, Hindi, Spanish, French, and German are available from the language dropdown. Pick the one that matches the text in your image for the best accuracy — mixing languages in one image can confuse recognition.

Can I edit the extracted text before downloading it?

Yes — the result appears in an editable text box, so you can fix any recognition errors directly before copying it or downloading it as a .txt file.

Is my image uploaded to a server?

No. Text recognition runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly — nothing leaves your device.