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Image to text

Pull the words out of a photo, scan or screenshot so you can copy, edit or search them. The text is read right here in your browser, so the picture never leaves your device.

Settings appear once you add an image.

Pick the language the picture is written in. Its model is downloaded once, 1–3 MB.

Keep the line breaks Off: each paragraph comes back as one flowing line, which pastes more cleanly into a document.

Done on your device No upload, no queue, no sign-up.

Bytes sent anywhere: 0 B

How to use it

Your picture goes into this browser tab, has its words read by the text reader on your device, and comes back as text to copy or save. 0 bytes uploaded

  1. Add your files

    Add a photo, scan or screenshot — several at once if you like. iPhone HEIC photos work too.

  2. Check the settings

    Choose the language the text is written in. Turn off Keep the line breaks if you want flowing paragraphs to paste into a document.

  3. Save the result

    Press read the text. Copy it straight from the result, or save it as a .txt file.

Why it doesn’t upload

Text in pictures is often the private kind: a bank letter, a prescription, a screenshot of a conversation. The text reader (Tesseract, compiled to WebAssembly) runs inside this tab, so the picture is read on your device and never sent to a server to be read there.

How to check for yourself

Worth knowing

  • Printed and on-screen text reads well. Handwriting mostly does not — neat block capitals sometimes work, joined-up writing rarely does.
  • The layout is not kept. Columns come back one after the other and tables as lines of text, not rows and cells.
  • Blurred, skewed, dim or very small text produces mistakes. The confidence score under the result tells you how sure the reader is; crop to just the text and retake the photo straight on if it is low.
  • Languages offered: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Indonesian and Hindi. Pick the right one — reading French with the English model drops the accents.
  • The first run downloads the reader (about 4 MB) and the language model (1–3 MB). After that they come from your browser’s cache, offline too.
  • This reads pictures. To get the text out of a PDF, save its pages as images first.

Getting a clean read

Crop to the text first. A photo of a whole desk with a page on it gives the reader a lot of wood grain to puzzle over. Crop Image takes seconds and usually lifts the confidence score more than anything else.

Shoot straight on, in even light. A page photographed at an angle, or with the phone’s shadow across it, loses letters at the edges. Screenshots are the easiest case of all: sharp, flat and perfectly lit.

Keep the line breaks for code, lists and addresses; turn them off for prose. With them off, each paragraph comes back as one line and words split across lines with a hyphen are joined again, so it pastes into a document as ordinary text.

Questions

How do I copy text from an image?

Add the picture, choose the language it is written in and press Read the text. The words appear in a box with a Copy text button, and you can also save them as a .txt file. On a phone, a screenshot of the text works just as well as a photo.

Is it accurate?

For clear printed or on-screen text, very — often only a word or two wrong on a page. Accuracy falls with blur, glare, curved pages, tiny text and decorative fonts. Every result shows a confidence score; below about 60% expect mistakes and check it against the picture.

Can it read handwriting?

Not reliably. The reader is trained on printed text, so tidy block capitals are the best case and joined-up handwriting usually comes back as nonsense. For handwritten notes, typing them out is still faster than correcting the result.

Does it work with Hindi, Spanish or other languages?

Yes: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Indonesian and Hindi, plus English and Hindi together for documents that mix the two. Choose the language before reading; each model is a one-time download of 1–3 MB.

Is there a limit, and is my image uploaded?

No daily limit, no sign-up and no upload. The text reader is downloaded to your browser once and runs in this tab, so each picture is read on your device and costs no server anything — which is why there is nothing to cap. The practical limit is your device: a long batch is slower on an older phone. You can watch the network log under the tool to see that only the reader and the language model come down.

Can it keep the layout, like columns or a table?

No. It returns the words in reading order as plain text. Columns come back one after another and tables as lines. That is usually what you want for copying a passage, but not for rebuilding a spreadsheet.

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