Image to Text (OCR)
Turn the text in any image into editable text. You can also take a screenshot and paste it here with Ctrl+V.
🔒 Your image is not uploaded — text is recognised on this device.
How to take a photo that reads well
- Straight on and close up — fill the frame with the text and keep it level.
- Bright, with no shadows — glare from lights or the shadow of your hand makes the tool miss characters.
- One column at a time — for newspaper-style layouts, crop each column separately first (crop image).
- Working with a PDF? — if the PDF already contains text, use PDF to text for a more accurate result. For scanned PDFs, convert the pages with PDF to JPG and drop the images in here.
Need to blur personal details before sharing a screenshot? Try blur faces & areas. More tools are in the image tools collection.
Frequently asked questions
Is my image uploaded to a server?
No. Text recognition (OCR) runs inside your browser. The first time you use it, the tool downloads the language data it needs (a few MB) — that is data for the recognition engine, not your image. After that it starts faster.
Can it read handwriting?
Large, neatly printed handwriting is often readable, but accuracy drops a lot for cursive or messy writing. The tool works best on printed text, screenshots and photos of documents.
What if the text is not recognised well?
Shoot close enough that the text fills the frame, straight on rather than at an angle, in bright light without shadows — accuracy improves a lot. Small images are automatically upscaled 2× before reading. Tables and multi-column layouts may come out with lines in a mixed-up order.
Does it work on my phone?
Yes, though a large photo can take 10–30 seconds on a phone. On a computer you can take a screenshot (Win+Shift+S on Windows, Cmd+Shift+4 on Mac) and paste it straight into this page with Ctrl+V / Cmd+V.
Which languages are supported?
English is selected by default. You can also tick Korean to read Korean text, or tick both for images that mix the two languages.