By Ahsan Khowaja · Updated 27 October 2026
How to convert an image to text
- Drop an image on the box above, tap Choose image, or paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac).
- Wait a few seconds while the text is read. The first time, your browser downloads the text reader (about 7 MB in total); after that it starts much faster.
- Check and edit the result in the text box, then Copy text or Download .txt.
This image to text converter is free, with no sign-up, no watermark and no daily limit, because the work happens on your own computer or phone rather than on our server. It reads printed English text: screenshots, scanned pages, photos of documents, slides, receipts and signs.
How the image to text OCR works
OCR stands for optical character recognition: software looks at the shapes in a picture and works out which letters and words they are. That is the OCR full form you'll see in exam questions and app descriptions. This tool uses Tesseract, a well-known open-source OCR engine, compiled to run inside your web browser. Tesseract finds the lines of text, splits them into words and uses a neural network trained on English to recognise each word.
The confidence figure shown above the result is Tesseract's own average certainty for the words it read. Above about 90%, most of the text will be right; a low figure means you should read the result carefully, because some words are probably wrong.
Tips for getting accurate text from an image
OCR is very good at clean printed text and struggles with messy pictures. Most mistakes come from the photo, not the reader:
- Sharp and straight. Hold the camera flat over the page, not at an angle, and make sure the text is in focus. Tilted or curved lines confuse any OCR.
- Good, even light. Avoid shadows across the page and glare on glossy paper.
- Big enough text. Letters should be at least about 20 pixels tall. If a screenshot is tiny, zoom in before you capture it. Making an already-small image bigger afterwards doesn't add detail.
- Crop to the text. Cut away photos, logos and backgrounds around the words; the image resizer can crop an exact area.
- Dark text on a light background works best. White text on a busy photo is the hardest case.
- One column at a time if a page has columns or a table; the reader may otherwise mix lines from different columns.
Handwriting, decorative fonts, very low-resolution images and languages other than English will give poor results with this tool. For handwriting, a dedicated handwriting-recognition app is a better choice.
Image to text extractor: what it can and can't read
| Picture | How well it works |
|---|---|
| Screenshot of a web page, app, PDF or chat | Very well: crisp, straight text |
| Scanned page (flatbed scanner or scanning app) | Very well |
| Phone photo of a printed document | Well if sharp, flat and evenly lit |
| Receipt | Usually well; faded thermal paper reads less reliably |
| Sign or poster photographed at an angle | Fair: crop and straighten first |
| Text over a photo or pattern (memes, banners) | Patchy |
| Handwriting | Poorly |
| Non-English text | Not supported by this tool yet |
The extractor gives you plain text. It doesn't keep fonts, bold, colours or layout, and tables come out as lines of words separated by spaces, so you may need to tidy columns after pasting.
Image to Word: getting the text into a document
To turn an image into a Word document, extract the text here, click Copy text, and paste it into Microsoft Word, Google Docs or any editor, then format it there. Because the result is plain text it pastes cleanly without strange formatting. The Download .txt button saves the text as a file that Word, Notepad and every other editor can open.
Image to text with Google, Windows and iPhone
You may already have OCR built into your phone or computer:
- Google: Google Lens (in the Google app and Chrome) can select and copy text from a picture, and in Google Drive you can right-click an image and choose Open with › Google Docs to get a document with the image's text underneath.
- Windows 11: the Snipping Tool has Text actions that copy text from a screenshot, and the free Microsoft PowerToys includes a Text Extractor (Win + Shift + T).
- iPhone and iPad: Live Text lets you press and hold on text in a photo or the camera view to copy it.
These are good options when you're already in those apps. This page is handy when you're on a computer without them, want to keep the image off cloud services, or want the text in an editable box with a one-click download.
Is it private?
Yes. The picture is read by code running in your browser and is never sent to our server or anyone else's. The only things downloaded are the OCR engine and the English language data, from our own domain. Close the tab and nothing is kept. If you need to share the picture itself afterwards, you can upload it to get a link.
Supported image formats and sizes
PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF (first frame) and BMP images up to 20 MB are supported. iPhone photos saved as HEIC need converting first with the HEIC to JPG converter. Very large photos (over about 4000 px wide) take longer to read without being more accurate, so if a big photo is slow, shrink it first with the image compressor.
