Image text extractor for pulling readable text out of photos, screenshots, and scanned documents using OCR technology. Upload your image and get the extracted text in seconds. This free browser-based tool keeps your files local with no account or server upload required.
The Image to Text tool extracts text from images using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, processing the image entirely in your browser using the Tesseract.js library. Upload a photo of a document, a screenshot containing text, a scanned page, or any image with readable text and the tool identifies and extracts all text, preserving line breaks and paragraph structure as accurately as possible. Language support includes English and can be extended to dozens of other languages supported by Tesseract. The extracted text is displayed in a copyable text field. This tool is useful for extracting text from document photos, making scanned PDFs searchable, pulling data from screenshots for further editing, and digitizing printed text without manual transcription.
Optical Character Recognition has improved dramatically over the past decade and modern OCR (based on neural networks rather than older template-matching approaches) achieves accuracy rates above 99 percent on clear, high-contrast documents with standard fonts. Accuracy decreases with factors like low resolution (images below 150 DPI are challenging), low contrast or faded text, tilted or distorted text, handwriting (much harder than printed text), unusual or decorative fonts, and complex backgrounds. For best results with this tool, use images of at least 300 DPI equivalent, ensure good contrast between text and background, align the text as straight as possible (slight rotation can be corrected in the image transform tool before OCR), and avoid using highly compressed JPEG images where compression artifacts obscure letter edges. Tesseract.js is the JavaScript port of the open-source Tesseract OCR engine originally developed by HP and now maintained by Google. It runs entirely in the browser using WebAssembly, which means no data is sent to any server. Language models are loaded on first use (a few megabytes each) and cached in the browser. For documents with multiple columns, the OCR engine may not always read columns in the correct left-to-right order. In these cases, manually selecting specific regions of the image before running OCR gives better results. For PDFs with embedded text (not scanned images), use the PDF to Text tool instead, which extracts text perfectly since it is already machine-readable.