Image to Text (OCR)
What is an Image to Text (OCR)?
The Image to Text converter runs Optical Character Recognition directly in your browser to turn a picture of text into text you can select, edit and search. Drop in a screenshot, a scanned page, a photographed receipt or a whiteboard snap, and the recognised characters appear as plain text ready to copy.
Because recognition happens locally with WebAssembly, the image is never uploaded. That matters when the picture is an invoice, an ID document, a medical form or an internal slide — content you cannot paste into an unknown web service.
When this tool is the right choice
- Screenshots of terminals or logs: recover an error message from a screenshot a colleague sent instead of retyping it.
- Scanned documents: pull paragraphs out of a scanned contract or textbook page so you can quote and search them.
- Receipts and invoices: lift totals, dates and reference numbers into a spreadsheet.
- Images in slide decks: extract text baked into a diagram that was exported as a flat picture.
- Accessibility work: generate a first-pass transcription to write alt text from.
How to use it
- Upload an image, or drag and drop it onto the drop zone. PNG, JPG, JPEG, WebP and BMP are all accepted.
- Choose the language of the text in the image. Picking the right language markedly improves accuracy on accented characters.
- Wait for the recognition pass to finish. The progress indicator reflects real work — larger images take longer.
- Review the extracted text, then copy it to your clipboard.
Getting the best accuracy
OCR quality depends far more on the input than on the engine. A straight-on, well-lit image at roughly 300 DPI with dark text on a light background is recognised close to perfectly. Accuracy drops on skewed photographs, low contrast, heavy JPEG compression, decorative or handwritten fonts, and text laid over a busy background. If a result looks poor, re-crop tightly around the text block and try again before assuming the text is unreadable.
Related Developer & Utility Tools
- PDF Text Extractor: pull text straight out of a PDF, which is more accurate than running OCR on a page image.
- Image Converter: change format or resize a picture before recognising it.
- Text Statistics: count words and characters in the text you extracted.
- QR Code Reader: decode a QR code from an image instead of reading its text.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my image uploaded to a server?
No. Recognition runs entirely in your browser using a WebAssembly OCR engine. The image never leaves your device, which is why the tool is safe for invoices, ID documents and internal material.
Which image formats are supported?
PNG, JPG/JPEG, WebP and BMP. For a multi-page scan, export each page as a separate image, or use the PDF Text Extractor if you still have the original PDF.
Why is the extracted text inaccurate?
OCR accuracy depends on the source image. Skewed angles, low contrast, blur, heavy compression, decorative fonts and handwriting all reduce it. Re-crop tightly around the text, use the highest resolution you have, and make sure you selected the correct language.
Does it handle languages other than English?
Yes. Select the language of the text before running recognition — the engine loads a matching model, which is what lets it resolve accented and non-Latin characters correctly.
Can it read handwriting?
Not reliably. The engine is trained on printed type. Neat block capitals sometimes work; cursive generally does not.
Why does the first run take longer?
The language model is downloaded and cached on first use. Subsequent recognitions with the same language start immediately.