# Tamil image to text (OCR)

> Extract Tamil text from photos, screenshots and scanned PDFs in your browser, in Tamil script. Copy or save as .txt. Free, no upload.

URL: https://tools.cuelark.com/image-to-text-tamil
Publisher: Cuelark Team (https://cuelark.com)
Updated: 2026-11-10
Price: free, no sign-up
Privacy: runs in the browser; files are not uploaded

Turn photos and scans of Tamil text into Unicode Tamil you can copy, search and edit. Useful for notices, books and screenshots, with English words read alongside.

## How to use it

1. Check that the language is Tamil; 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:** Tamil, 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.

### Does it work for Telugu, Kannada or Malayalam?

Yes. Each has its own model in the language list: Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Choose the one that matches the script in the image.

### What affects accuracy most?

Image sharpness and size. Tamil vowel signs are small, so photograph close enough that a line of text is at least 30 pixels tall, and keep Clean up on for paper.

## Related tools

- [Image to text (OCR)](https://tools.cuelark.com/image-to-text)
- [Hindi image to text (OCR)](https://tools.cuelark.com/image-to-text-hindi)
- [Bengali image to text (OCR)](https://tools.cuelark.com/image-to-text-bengali)
- [Word counter](https://tools.cuelark.com/word-counter)