Image to text
Copy the printed words out of a screenshot, a photo of a sign or a page, or a picture someone sent you. The text reader runs privately in your browser, so your picture is never uploaded, and you can check the text before you copy or download it.
How to use it
- Wait a moment while the text reader gets ready, the first time only.
- Choose your pictures, drag them onto the box, or paste a screenshot.
- Check the text, then copy it or download it as a text file.
What it reads well, and what it does not
It reads printed English text: screenshots, photos of documents, letters, labels, signs and receipts, taken square-on and in focus. Small text in a screenshot is enlarged before it is read, which helps a great deal.
It is poor at handwriting, and it struggles with blurred, tilted or very dark photos, decorative fonts and text on busy backgrounds. Where a picture looks hard to read, the page says that parts may be wrong. Always check the text before relying on it, particularly names, numbers and dates.
Private, because it runs on your device
Most image to text websites upload your picture to their computers to read it. Here, the text reader itself is downloaded to your device when the page opens, about 7 MB and normally reused by your browser next time, and the page then locks itself so that it cannot send anything anywhere before you choose a picture. This makes it suitable for screenshots of messages, documents and anything else you would rather keep to yourself.
How it works
The reading is done by Tesseract, a well-known open-source text recognition engine, with its English language data. It is a form of AI, a trained model that recognises letters, but it runs entirely inside your browser. For a scanned PDF, use Make PDF searchable instead, which keeps the pages as they are and makes the words searchable.
Questions
Which languages does it read?
English only for now. Other languages that use the same alphabet may partly work, but accents and special letters will often be read wrongly.
How many pictures can I do at once?
Up to five at a time for free. A Day Pass or a subscription removes that limit, although a phone may slow down with very many large photos.
Are my files uploaded?
No. The work happens inside your web browser, on your own device. Before your file is opened, this page locks itself: from then on your browser refuses to let it fetch, upload or send anything at all. You can check: once the page has loaded, switch off your internet connection and it will still work. How the lock works.