How to use it
- Drop a photo, screenshot or scan into the box, or choose it from your device.
- Wait while the text is read. The first image takes longer because the reader has to load.
- Copy the text or download it as a .txt file.
What OCR does
OCR, short for optical character recognition, turns a picture of text into text you can edit, search and paste. Typical uses are copying a quote from a screenshot, pulling the numbers from a photographed receipt, or reading a scanned page.
Reading text without uploading the image
The reader is Tesseract, an open-source OCR engine, running inside your browser. Your image is never sent anywhere, which is useful for IDs, contracts and private letters. The first time you use it, your browser downloads the reader and its English language data, a few megabytes, and after that it opens faster.
Getting good results
Use a sharp, well-lit image, taken straight on rather than at an angle. Black text on a plain light background works best. Small text, heavy shadows, handwriting and decorative fonts are harder, so expect to fix a few mistakes by hand. Right now the reader handles English text.
Other file types
JPG, PNG, WebP and HEIC images are accepted. To read text from a PDF, first save its pages as images with the PDF to PNG tool, then run them through this one.
Frequently asked questions
Are my files uploaded anywhere?
No. The work runs inside your browser on your own device. Your files are never sent to our server or to anyone else. You can confirm this in your browser's developer tools: the network tab shows no file data leaving the page.
Which languages does it support?
English only for now. Text in other languages may come out as nonsense.
Why is the text full of mistakes?
OCR depends on image quality. Try a larger, sharper, better-lit picture with the text facing the camera.
Can it read handwriting?
Not reliably. It is built for printed text.
Is there a limit on image size?
Large images are scaled down to a maximum of 3000 pixels on the long side before reading, which keeps it fast without hurting accuracy.