Image to text

How to use it

1. Paste a screenshot or choose a photo. HEIC and HEIF photos from an iPhone are accepted. Wait a moment the first time while the text reader gets ready.
2. The Tesseract text reader looks for printed English in the picture. Small text in a screenshot is enlarged before it is read.
3. Check the text carefully. The page warns you where parts may be wrong.
4. Copy the text, or download it as a text file. Your original picture is left unchanged.

What kinds of picture work best

Clear printed English works best: screenshots, photos of letters and printed documents, labels, signs and receipts. For a photo, take it square-on and keep the text in focus.

Text from a screenshot

Screenshots often hold small text that is awkward to copy by hand. Paste the screenshot into the page and the reader will try to pick out the printed English. Small screenshot text is enlarged first, because very small text is hard for a text reader to examine directly.

Always compare the result with the original screenshot before you rely on it.

Text from a photo of a document, letter or receipt

Use this when the words you need are trapped inside a photo and cannot be selected. A clear, square-on photo gives the reader the best chance. Clear printed text on a plain background is easier to read than faint or decorative text.

If the document is a scanned PDF rather than a photo, use Make PDF searchable to keep the pages as they are and make the words searchable, or PDF to text to take the words out of a PDF.

What the text reader finds harder

It is made for printed English and is poor at handwriting. It can also struggle with blurred, tilted or very dark photos, decorative fonts and text on busy backgrounds. Where a picture looks hard to read, the page warns you that parts may be wrong, but the final check is always yours.

Check names, numbers and dates

Text recognition can make mistakes even when the picture looks clear to you. Check names, numbers, dates, addresses and reference numbers in particular, because one wrong character can matter. The page helps you get the text out; you decide whether it matches the original.

Private, because it runs on your device

Many image to text websites upload your picture to their computers to read it. Here, the text reader and its English language data, about 7 MB, are downloaded to your device when the page opens and are normally reused by your browser next time. The page then locks itself, so that it cannot send anything anywhere before you choose a picture. That makes it suitable for screenshots of messages, documents and anything else you would rather keep to yourself. If you plan to share the picture afterwards, Blur image can hide names and faces first.

English only for now

The tool reads printed English only. Do not rely on it for text in another language, because accents and special letters will often be read wrongly.

Free, with no account

You do not need an account. Single pictures are free, and so are batches of up to 5 at a time and up to 10 free pictures a day in this browser. A Day Pass or a subscription removes those limits, although a phone may slow down with very many large photos. The pictures are still read on your own device.

Questions