Image to Text Converter
Extract text from photos, scans and screenshots in seconds. Free, in 18 languages, and your images never leave your device.
What is OCR?
OCR (optical character recognition) is technology that reads the letters in a picture and turns them into text you can edit. This image to text converter runs OCR right in your browser. It finds each line in a photo, scan or screenshot and gives it back as plain text.
What people use image to text for
Work
- Copy text from a scanned letter or contract
- Grab the details from a photo of an invoice or receipt
- Reuse text from slides that were shared as images
- Pull contact details from a photo of a business card
School and study
- Turn book pages into notes you can search
- Copy quotes from a printed article
- Get the text out of lecture slides
- Save printed handouts as text files
Everyday
- Copy text from a screenshot of a chat or web page
- Save a recipe from a photo of a cookbook
- Copy the words on a sign, then paste them into a translator
- Get the text from a meme or social media image
How to convert an image to text
- 1
Add your images
Drop images on the page, click Choose images, or paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac). You can add up to 50 at once.
- 2
Check the language
The language of this page is picked for you. Choose another in the language menu, or pick up to 3 for mixed text. Reading starts right away.
- 3
Copy or download
Fix anything in the text box, then copy the text or save it as a .txt file. With several images, download everything as one file or as a ZIP.
Extract text from JPG, PNG, photos and screenshots
Turn any picture into text, from a phone photo to a saved screenshot. The converter reads all common image types, including HEIC files from an iPhone.
- JPG and PNG: photos, scans and saved images
- WebP and AVIF: images saved from websites
- HEIC and HEIF: iPhone photos, with no need to convert them first
- GIF, BMP and TIFF: older formats and scanner files (for a GIF, the first frame is read)
Your images never leave your device
Many online converters send your image to a server to read it. This one reads it in your browser, so the file stays on your phone or computer.
- Nothing is uploaded. The image is read on your own device.
- No account and no captcha. Open the page and start.
- No daily limit. Read as many images as you like, up to 50 at a time.
The first time you use it, your browser downloads the text reader: about 4 MB for English. After that, it's saved in your browser and starts faster.
Keep line breaks or join them into paragraphs
Text in an image is broken into short lines. Turn on Join lines into paragraphs to put wrapped sentences back together, so the text pastes cleanly into a document or email.
Headings and list items stay on their own lines. Words split with a hyphen at the end of a line are joined again. Turn the option off to keep every line break from the image.
Tips for the best results
Clear, printed text gives the most accurate results. These steps help:
- Pick the right language. German text read as English loses its umlauts, for example.
- Select just the text you need. Drag a box on the image to skip logos, photos and backgrounds.
- Rotate sideways photos with the rotate buttons.
- Use a sharp photo taken in good light, with the phone held straight above the page.
- Check names, numbers and email addresses. They are the easiest to misread.
OCR has limits. Handwriting, blurry photos and fancy fonts often come out with mistakes, so read the text through before you use it.
Want to keep your scans as a document instead of text? Combine the images into one file with Image to PDF.
Related tools
More free tools for images and documents
Frequently asked questions
Accuracy, languages, limits and privacy