How to Extract Text from an Image (Free OCR Guide)

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) turns the text inside an image into text you can actually select, edit, and copy — instead of retyping a scanned page or a screenshot by hand. Our free Image to Text (OCR) tool runs entirely in your browser using Tesseract.js, an open-source OCR engine.

How to Use It

Open the Image to Text tool and pick the language of the text in your image from the dropdown.
Upload an image — click the box or drag and drop a photo, screenshot, or scan.
Click "Extract Text." A progress bar shows recognition progress; the first run also downloads a small language data file.
Review the result in the editable text box and fix any misread characters.
Copy the text or download it as a .txt file.

Common Use Cases

Digitizing printed documents — pull text out of a scanned contract, form, or book page.
Copying text from a screenshot — grab a quote, code snippet, or error message without retyping it.
Reading a receipt or sign — extract details from a photo taken on your phone.
Archiving old notes — convert a photo of handwritten or printed notes into searchable text (printed text works far better than handwriting).

Tips for Better Accuracy

Use a clear, well-lit, high-resolution image where the text isn't blurry or at a steep angle — straight-on photos of printed text give the best results. Cropping out unrelated parts of the image before uploading can also improve accuracy by giving the OCR engine less noise to sort through. Make sure you've selected the correct language, since each one uses different trained data.

Your image is processed entirely on your device and never uploaded to a server. Try it now with the free Image to Text (OCR) tool.

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