Image to Text — OCR in Your Browser

Extract text from photos, screenshots, and scanned documents.

Drop an image here or

How to use

  1. Drop or browse for an image — JPG, PNG, WebP, or BMP.
  2. Click Extract text. The first run downloads roughly 8 MB of OCR engine and language data from this site (cached by your browser for next time).
  3. Read the extracted text below, copy it, or download as a .txt file.

What does it do?

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) turns pixels that look like text into actual text. This tool runs Tesseract — the open-source OCR engine maintained by Google — compiled to WebAssembly. Supports English out of the box. Works best on printed text; handwriting recognition is weaker.

Tips for best results

  • High contrast between text and background.
  • Un-skewed scans — rotate the image first with the Image Cropper if it's sideways or tilted.
  • 300 DPI or higher for scanned documents.
  • Printed text works much better than handwriting.
  • For a multi-page PDF, convert to images first with PDF to JPG / PNG and OCR each page.

Is my image uploaded?

No. We don't save any of the images you drop in or the text they produce. Whatever you OCR is discarded when you close or refresh the page — no logs, no record on our side of what you scanned. On your first use, the engine and language model download from this site once and are cached in your browser for subsequent runs; after that there is no further network activity related to your images.

Why is the first run slow?

Tesseract needs about 4 MB of compiled engine code and 4 MB of language model data on the first use. Both are cached by your browser, so subsequent runs start in under a second. Recognition itself typically takes 2–10 seconds for a typical screenshot and scales roughly with image size.

Accuracy

This tool uses the fast Tesseract language data — a good balance of speed and accuracy. For dense scans or low-contrast documents where accuracy matters more than size, the standard or best Tesseract data files produce noticeably better results at the cost of larger downloads; we may add a toggle for those later.

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