Image to Text Converter

Image to Text — free online OCR, extract text from images instantly in your browser

Need to extract text from a screenshot, scanned document, photo of a sign, or an image file? This Image to Text converter runs optical character recognition (OCR) entirely in your browser using Tesseract.js. Your image never leaves your device — no upload, no server, no privacy concerns.

How it works

1. Upload an image (PNG, JPG, WebP) — drag & drop, click to browse, or paste from clipboard.
2. Select the language of the text in your image. English is the default; 13 languages are supported including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and major European languages.
3. Click Recognize Text. The tool downloads a small language model (first use only) and runs OCR locally.
4. Review the extracted text, copy it to clipboard, or download as a .txt file.

Supported languages

English, Chinese Simplified, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Dutch. The language model is downloaded once and cached in your browser for future use.

Who uses this tool

• Students — extract text from textbook photos, lecture slides, and research papers.
• Professionals — grab text from screenshots, scanned contracts, and invoices.
• Travelers — translate signs and menus by extracting foreign-language text first.
• Developers — extract error messages from screenshots, convert terminal output to searchable text.
• Accessibility — convert image-based text into readable, screen-reader-friendly plain text.

Tips for best results

• Use clear, well-lit images with high contrast between text and background.
• Avoid skewed or heavily rotated images — straight text works best.
• High-resolution images (at least 200 DPI equivalent) produce better accuracy.
• Select the correct language to match the text content — mixing languages may reduce accuracy.
• Handwritten text recognition is limited; printed text works much better.

Privacy and browser-side processing

This is the key advantage of this tool: everything happens in your browser. The image file is never uploaded to any server. The OCR engine (Tesseract.js) runs locally as WebAssembly. The language models are downloaded from a CDN on first use, but the actual image recognition processes your image entirely offline and local. This makes it safe for sensitive documents, private screenshots, medical records, legal documents, and any data you cannot afford to upload to a third-party service.

Limitations

• First-time language use requires downloading a ~10-15 MB language model. This is cached for future visits.
• Handwritten text accuracy varies significantly depending on handwriting clarity.
• Complex layouts (multi-column, tables with merged cells) may produce jumbled output.
• Very large images (4000+ pixels) may take longer to process and could hit browser memory limits.

Real OCR in the browser with Tesseract.js

This tool runs the open-source Tesseract OCR engine compiled to WebAssembly. The first time you use it for a given language, the browser downloads the language model (about 10–15 MB). After that, recognition happens locally with no upload. Your image and the recognized text stay on your device.

Best results: a quick checklist

• Use sharp, well-lit images — phone photos in good light work as well as scans.
• Crop tight around the text and remove background clutter where possible.
• For tilted text, straighten the image first using a simple crop / rotate tool.
• Black text on a white background recognizes most reliably. Inverted or low-contrast text (light-on-light, dark-on-dark) is harder.
• Make sure each character is at least 25 pixels tall in the source image; below that, OCR accuracy drops sharply.

Common use cases

• Receipts and invoices — pull line items into a spreadsheet.
• Business cards — capture name, title, phone, email without retyping.
• Handwritten notes — Tesseract handles clean handwriting reasonably; expect lower accuracy than printed text.
• Books and articles — quote a paragraph from a print source without retyping.
• Screenshots — extract text from a screenshot of an app, a slide, or a chart label.
• Whiteboards — turn a meeting whiteboard photo into editable notes.
• Equation OCR — basic math recognition; for serious math use a LaTeX-specialized OCR.

Multi-language support

This tool ships 13 language models: English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, and Hindi. Switch language in the picker before clicking Recognize. Models are cached after first download so subsequent recognitions are fast.

Privacy vs cloud OCR

Cloud OCR services (Google Cloud Vision, AWS Textract, Azure Form Recognizer) are accurate but upload your image to a third party. For receipts, ID cards, medical forms, and other sensitive scans, browser-side OCR is the safer choice. The trade-off is recognition speed and accuracy: cloud OCR is faster and more accurate on hard inputs. This tool covers the privacy-first 80% of use cases for free.

Full guide: OCR receipts without uploading

Need a receipt-focused workflow for expenses, spreadsheets, privacy, and accuracy checks? Read How to OCR a receipt for free without uploading the image.

Related tools

People using Image to Text also often use PDF to Text, Image Compressor, QR Code Scanner, JPG to PDF, and Word Counter.