Image to Text Converter

Pull the text out of an image. Drop in a screenshot, a photo of a document, a scan or a receipt and this tool reads the words using OCR (optical character recognition) — in English and about a dozen other languages. It runs entirely in your browser: your images are never uploaded.

How do I use it?

Drop one or more images onto the uploader (or click to browse), pick the language of the text, and press Extract text. A progress bar shows the read in real time, and the recognised text appears on the right along with a confidence score. Add several images and their text is combined in order.

Every image is automatically sharpened before reading — converted to grayscale, contrast-stretched, and upscaled if it's small — which measurably helps on low-resolution or low-contrast photos. If your image is a receipt, form or anything with scattered text blocks rather than one solid paragraph, switch Page mode to "Sparse text" for a better read.

What is OCR?

OCR — optical character recognition — is the technology that turns a picture of text into actual, editable, searchable characters. It's how a scan of a page becomes copy-pasteable text. This tool uses Tesseract, a mature open-source OCR engine, compiled to run directly in your browser.

Which images work best?

Clear, high-contrast, roughly straight text works best — a screenshot of an article, a scanned page, a photo taken square-on in good light. OCR struggles with:

• low resolution or blurry images,
• handwriting (it's built for printed text),
• text at an angle or on a curved surface,
• busy backgrounds or text over images,
• very stylised or decorative fonts.

If the result is poor, try a sharper or larger image, or crop to just the text.

Do I have to pick the right language?

Yes — pick the language the text is written in. Choosing English for a Chinese image, or vice versa, produces garbage, because the engine maps shapes to characters in the chosen language. The first read in a given language downloads that language's model (a few megabytes), so it may take a moment; subsequent reads are faster.

Is my image uploaded anywhere?

No. The OCR runs on your own machine, in your browser, in a background thread. The image never leaves your device — only the recognition engine itself is downloaded. That makes it safe for private documents, IDs and screenshots.

Can I read a PDF?

Not directly — this tool reads images. Take a screenshot of the PDF page, or export the page as an image, then drop that in.