How to Extract Text From an Image (Free, In-Browser)
Updated 2026-06-21
To extract text from an image, open an OCR (optical character recognition) tool, drop in your photo or screenshot, and let it recognize the characters into copyable text. With OCR — Image & PDF to Text, this happens entirely in your browser — the image is never uploaded, and there is no signup.
Pull text out of a photo or screenshot
OCR reads the shapes of letters in a picture and turns them back into real, selectable text you can copy, edit, or search.
- Open OCR — Image & PDF to Text.
- Pick the language that matches the document — English, Spanish, French, or German. The first time you use a non-English model it downloads once, then it is cached.
- Drop your file on the drop zone, or click to browse. It accepts PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, BMP, and TIFF, up to 50 MB.
- Wait a few seconds while it recognizes the text locally — large images take longer, especially on a phone.
- Copy the result, or download it as a .txt file. You can also edit the text right in the box before copying.
A worked example: snap a photo of a printed receipt, drop it in, and the line items and totals come out as plain text you can paste into a spreadsheet — no retyping.
Scanned PDFs: text layer first, OCR only when needed
Drop in a PDF and the tool is smart about it. For each page it first checks for an embedded text layer — if the page already has real text (a born-digital PDF), that text is pulled out instantly and perfectly, no OCR guesswork involved. Only image-only pages, like a scan or a photographed document, get rasterized and run through OCR. The result labels each page so you know which path produced it.
It processes up to 100 pages per PDF to keep your browser responsive, and warns you if a document is longer.
Get cleaner results
OCR accuracy depends almost entirely on the input. A few things that help:
- Use a sharp, high-contrast image. Blurry or low-resolution photos are the main cause of garbled output.
- Keep the text upright. Rotated or skewed lines confuse character recognition.
- Match the language setting to the document. English text read as French (or vice versa) produces errors.
- Watch the confidence score. The tool shows an average confidence; below 60% it flags that the text may contain mistakes, so proofread before trusting it.
Two things OCR cannot do well: handwriting rarely reads accurately, and a genuinely blank or extremely low-resolution image returns nothing.
Why do it in the browser
Most online OCR services upload your file to a server. That is a problem when the image is an ID card, a contract, a medical form, or anything you would rather not hand to a third party. Here, recognition runs on your own device using the Tesseract engine; only the engine and language model are fetched once from a CDN, and the file you drop never leaves your computer.
Ready to convert an image to text? Open OCR — Image & PDF to Text and drop your first file.