Image to Text Converter (OCR)
Pull the text out of a photograph, screenshot or scanned page. Recognition runs on your own device, so the image never leaves it.
Picking the right language makes a large difference
Recognition runs on your own device using Tesseract compiled to WebAssembly, so the image itself is never uploaded. The engine and the language data are fetched from a public CDN the first time you use the tool, then cached by your browser. Accuracy depends heavily on image quality: printed text in a straight, well-lit, in-focus photo reads well, while handwriting and skewed or shadowed pages read poorly.
How to use
- 1Choose or drop the image containing the text.
- 2Select the language the text is written in.
- 3Click Extract Text and wait while the page is read.
- 4Correct anything the engine misread, then copy or download the result.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is OCR?
Optical Character Recognition — software that identifies letters and words inside an image and converts them into editable text. It is what turns a photograph of a page into something you can search, copy and edit.
Is my image uploaded to a server?
No. Recognition runs entirely in your browser using Tesseract compiled to WebAssembly. The engine and language data are downloaded from a public CDN the first time you use the tool, but your image itself never leaves your device.
Why is the first run slow?
Because the recognition engine and the language file — several megabytes in total — have to download once. Your browser caches them, so subsequent runs start almost immediately.
How accurate is it?
For clean printed text photographed straight-on in good light, typically 95% or better. Accuracy drops sharply with blur, skew, shadows, low contrast, or unusual fonts. Handwriting is generally not recognised well at all.
How can I get better results?
Photograph the page flat and square rather than at an angle, use even lighting with no shadow across the text, get as close as you can while keeping the whole text in frame, and select the correct language. A scan at 300 DPI beats any phone photo.
Which Indian languages are supported?
Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi and Urdu, plus a combined English and Hindi mode for documents that mix the two. Indic scripts are harder to recognise than Latin ones, so expect to correct more.
Can I extract text from a PDF?
If the PDF has a real text layer, use our PDF to Text tool instead — it is instant and exact. Use OCR only for scanned PDFs, and convert the pages to images first with our PDF to JPG tool.