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Extract Text from an Image

On-device OCR. Drop a photo or screenshot, get plain text back.

Processed entirely in your browser. Never uploaded to a server.

Or drop a photo or screenshot here.

This tool reads the text visible in a photo or screenshot and turns it into plain, selectable text you can copy or download — useful for pulling a quote out of a screenshot, digitizing a printed page, or grabbing text from an image where you can't just highlight it. It runs Tesseract, an open-source OCR engine, entirely inside this browser tab.

Drop an image above or choose one from your device. The first run downloads a small amount of English-language OCR data (cached afterwards, so later runs skip it), then recognition starts automatically — no button to click. Results appear in the text box, ready to copy or save as a .txt file.

OCR is pattern matching against printed letterforms, not real reading comprehension, so accuracy depends a lot on the source image. Handwriting, very stylized or decorative fonts, low-resolution or blurry photos, and skewed or rotated text all reduce accuracy — this is not a tool that reads perfectly in every case. If a result looks off, try a sharper photo, or straighten and tighten the crop first: Rotate Image and Crop Image often noticeably improve OCR results on an angled photo or a screenshot with a lot of surrounding clutter.

FAQ

Is my photo uploaded to extract the text?
No. The image is never uploaded — recognition runs on-device using the Tesseract OCR engine in a background worker in this tab. What does come from a CDN, separately, is the OCR language data (a few MB of English character patterns), fetched once and cached by your browser. That download contains no data of yours; your image is never part of it.
How accurate is this?
It depends heavily on the source image. Clean, high-contrast, well-lit screenshots or document photos of printed text typically come back very accurate. Low-resolution, blurry, low-contrast, or skewed photos produce more mistakes — OCR is pattern matching against printed letterforms, not real reading comprehension, so it can't infer a word it can't clearly see.
Does it work on handwriting?
Generally no. This tool uses Tesseract's printed-text model, which is tuned for fonts, not handwriting. It may pick out a few words from very neat, well-spaced handwriting, but don't expect reliable results — dedicated handwriting-recognition models are a different technology.
Does it support languages other than English?
Not yet. This version is English-only. Tesseract itself supports many languages, so this is a scoping choice for now, not a technical limit.
Why did it miss some text or get words wrong?
Very stylized or decorative fonts, tightly kerned or overlapping text, low resolution, and rotated or skewed source images all reduce accuracy. Cropping tightly to just the text and straightening a rotated photo before running OCR usually helps a lot.

Related tools: Need text from a PDF instead of a photo? That's a different problem — a PDF often already has a real text layer, so no OCR guessing is needed. See PDF to Text. For getting a cleaner source image before running OCR, see Crop Image and Rotate Image.