Image to Text Converter (OCR)
Extract editable text from an image, screenshot or photo right in your browser — no upload, 12 languages.
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How to use the Image to Text Converter (OCR)
- Drag and drop an image, paste a screenshot, choose a file, or paste an image URL.
- Pick the language of the text in the image.
- Click "Extract text" and wait for recognition to finish.
- Review the text, then Copy it or Download it as a .txt file.
Examples
| Input | Output | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Screenshot of an error message | The exact error text, ready to search or paste | |
Photo of a book page | The paragraph text as editable characters | |
Scanned receipt (PNG) | Line items and totals as text (accuracy varies with image quality) |
How image-to-text conversion works
Optical Character Recognition analyses the pixels of an image, isolates character shapes, and matches them against a trained model to output text. This converter runs the Tesseract OCR engine as WebAssembly, so the whole process happens locally in your browser after a one-time language-data download.
Good vs poor OCR input
| Works well | Struggles |
|---|---|
| Sharp screenshots of on-screen text | Blurry or low-resolution photos |
| High-contrast black text on white | Text over busy backgrounds or gradients |
| Straight, upright pages | Skewed, rotated or curved pages |
| Standard print fonts | Handwriting, script and decorative fonts |
Common uses
- Copying text out of a screenshot or error dialog
- Digitising notes, receipts and printed documents
- Pulling a quote from a photo of a book or sign
- Making an image-only PDF page searchable
Related tools
Once you have the text, clean it up with the Text Case Converter, count it with the Word Counter, or turn a heading into a URL with the Slug Generator.
Frequently asked questions
What is OCR?
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the process of detecting letters and words in an image and converting them into machine-readable text you can select, edit and search. This tool uses the open-source Tesseract engine compiled to WebAssembly.
Is my image uploaded anywhere?
No. Recognition runs entirely in your browser. The only network request is a one-time download of the language data file from a public CDN, which your browser then caches; your image never leaves your device.
Which image formats and languages are supported?
Any format the browser can display — JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP. Twelve languages are available, including English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Arabic, Russian, Chinese and Japanese.
Why is the first run slow?
The first time you use a language, a trained-data file of roughly 2–15 MB is downloaded. After that it is cached and recognition starts almost immediately.
How can I improve accuracy?
Use a sharp, high-contrast, straight image with the correct language selected. Crop out borders and graphics, avoid heavy JPEG compression, and prefer at least 300 DPI for scans. Handwriting and stylised fonts are not well supported.
Does it keep the layout?
It preserves line breaks and reading order reasonably well but does not reproduce columns, tables or exact spacing. Expect a plain-text version of the words.