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Image to text (OCR)

Image never leaves this browser

Drop a photo, screenshot or scanned PDF and get the text back, ready to copy. Recognition runs in your browser, so screenshots of chats, bills or ID cards stay on your device.

Helps photos of paper; turn off for coloured screenshots

How to use it

  1. Check that the language is right; tick Also read English if the text mixes in English words.
  2. Drop the image or scanned PDF, or paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V. The first run downloads the language data.
  3. Copy the text or save it as a .txt file. Check names and numbers against the original.

Details

Engine
Tesseract 5 LSTM via tesseract.js 7 (Apache-2.0), running in a Web Worker in this tab
Language
English by default, or any of 120+ Tesseract languages from the list. Mixed-language text: tick Also read English
Input
JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, screenshots pasted with Ctrl+V, and scanned PDFs (up to 30 pages, rendered at 200 DPI)
Download
The engine and the language data, a few megabytes each, fetched once from jsDelivr and cached by the browser
Output
Plain text you can copy or save as .txt, with Tesseract's confidence score per image

Questions

Is my image uploaded?

No. Text recognition runs in this tab with Tesseract compiled to WebAssembly. The only downloads are the engine and the language data (from the jsDelivr CDN, cached after the first time); your image is never part of any request.

How accurate is it?

On clear printed text and screenshots, Tesseract usually gets nearly every character right. Accuracy drops with blur, low light, curved pages, decorative fonts and small text. Handwriting is read poorly; check the confidence score and proofread names and numbers.

How do I get better results?

Photograph the page straight on in good light, crop to the text, and keep Clean up on for paper. For screenshots with coloured backgrounds, turn Clean up off. Choosing the right language matters more than anything else.

Can it read a scanned PDF?

Yes. Drop the PDF and each page (up to 30) is rendered at 200 DPI and read. If the PDF already contains selectable text, copying it from a PDF reader is faster and exact.

Does it keep the layout, tables or formatting?

No. You get plain text in reading order, with line breaks. Tables come out as lines of text.

Can I read text from a screenshot without saving it?

Yes. Take the screenshot, click this page and press Ctrl+V (⌘V on a Mac).