Extract text from any image using OCR. Upload a photo or screenshot and get editable, copyable plain text instantly. Runs entirely in your browser.
Image to Text
Processing…
FREE
Loading…
Drop an image or browse
JPG, PNG, WEBP, BMP, TIFF supported
Image to Text applies OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to any single image — a photo, a screenshot, a downloaded graphic, a scanned page saved as JPG or PNG — and turns whatever text it contains into plain, editable characters you can copy, correct, and reuse. This is the general-purpose version of OCR on this site: it isn't built around a camera-capture workflow like Scan to Text, and it doesn't reconstruct a searchable copy of an existing PDF the way PDF OCR Search does. It exists for the simpler, more common case — you already have an image file sitting on your device, and you need the words inside it as actual text rather than as pixels.
OCR itself works by pattern recognition rather than "reading" in any human sense. The image is first pre-processed — converted to grayscale, thresholded to separate dark text from light background, and often deskewed if the text is slightly rotated — and then segmented into lines, words, and finally individual glyphs. Each glyph shape is compared against a trained model of what characters in a given language typically look like, and the engine assembles its best guess at the underlying text, word by word, using dictionary and language-frequency data to resolve ambiguous shapes (distinguishing a lowercase "l" from a numeral "1" from a capital "I", for instance, is a classic OCR challenge that context and dictionary lookups help resolve). This tool runs Tesseract.js, a WebAssembly build of Tesseract — the open-source OCR engine originally developed at HP in the 1980s, open-sourced in 2005, and now maintained with Google's backing. Tesseract is widely regarded as the most capable open-source OCR engine available and is the same underlying technology behind a large share of commercial and open-source OCR products.
Accuracy in practice depends heavily on image quality rather than on the engine itself. Clean, high-contrast printed text — a screenshot of an article, a crisp photo of a printed page, a well-lit sign — routinely gets recognized with well over 95% character accuracy. Accuracy drops noticeably with low resolution (anything under roughly 150-200 effective DPI starts to blur glyph edges together), poor lighting or shadows across the text, skewed or rotated capture angles, unusual or decorative fonts, and especially handwriting, which Tesseract was never primarily designed to handle. Understanding that trade-off is more useful than treating OCR as a black box: if a result comes back garbled, the fix is almost always to retake or re-crop the source image rather than to expect the engine to compensate.
Because the entire recognition pipeline — image decoding, preprocessing, character segmentation, and text assembly — runs as WebAssembly inside your own browser tab, no image you upload here is ever transmitted anywhere. That matters for the kind of content people actually run through OCR: screenshots of private conversations, photos of ID documents or forms, internal business receipts, or personal notes. The recognized text lands in an editable text area on the page itself, so you can fix any misread characters before copying it to your clipboard or saving it as a plain .txt file.
When you drop an image, it's decoded by the browser's native image engine and handed to Tesseract.js, a WebAssembly compilation of the open-source Tesseract OCR engine. Tesseract first pre-processes the image — normalizing it to grayscale, applying binarization to separate text pixels from background, and correcting minor skew — then segments the page into text blocks, lines, and individual words using connected-component analysis. Each word is further broken into candidate character shapes, which are scored against Tesseract's trained character-recognition model and refined using dictionary and language-model context to resolve ambiguous or similar-looking glyphs. The assembled text, along with a confidence score per word, is returned to the page and displayed in an editable text area. Every step of this — decoding, preprocessing, segmentation, recognition — executes locally in your browser via WebAssembly; nothing is ever sent to a server.
Upload your image
Drop a JPG, PNG, WebP, or other supported image containing printed or typed text onto the upload area, or click to browse your device.
Let Tesseract load
The OCR engine initializes as WebAssembly in your browser the first time you run it — a brief one-time load before recognition begins.
Extract text
Click "Extract Text". Tesseract OCR analyzes the image locally, segmenting it into lines and characters and recognizing each one.
Review the result
The recognized text appears in an editable text area. Scan it for obvious misreads, especially around numbers, punctuation, and unusual fonts.
Correct any errors
Edit the text directly in the box — OCR is rarely 100% perfect on the first pass, and quick manual fixes take seconds.
Copy or download
Copy the finished text to your clipboard or download it as a .txt file for use in documents, notes, or further processing.
Screenshot Text Extraction
Pull editable text out of screenshots, error messages, chat logs, or UI captures instead of retyping what you see on screen.
Downloaded Graphics
Extract text baked into an infographic, meme, or downloaded image file where the words exist only as pixels, not selectable characters.
Photographed Book Pages
Photograph a printed page or article and pull out the text for quoting, note-taking, or building a searchable personal archive.
Signs, Menus & Notices
Capture text from a photographed sign, restaurant menu, or public notice and copy it into notes, messages, or a translation tool.
Foreign Language Capture
Extract printed text in another language from a photo so it can be pasted into a translation service rather than retyped character by character.
Business Card Text
Photograph a business card and extract the name, phone number, and email as text you can paste directly into your contacts app.
100% Private Recognition
Tesseract OCR runs entirely in your browser via WebAssembly — the image you upload is never sent to a server at any point.
Built on the Leading Open-Source Engine
Uses Tesseract, the open-source OCR engine originally from HP and now Google-backed, which underlies a large share of commercial and open-source OCR products.
Wide Format Support
Accepts JPG, PNG, WebP, BMP, GIF, and TIFF — virtually any raster image format a phone, screenshot tool, or download might produce.
Editable Output, Not a Locked Result
The recognized text lands in an editable text area so you can fix any misread characters before copying or downloading it.
General-Purpose, Not Camera-Locked
Unlike a camera-first scanning workflow, this tool works equally well on any existing image file already sitting on your device.
Free to Start — Sign Up for More
Use free with no account for standard file sizes. Sign up free to raise your limit to 80 MB, or upgrade to Pro for 250 MB per file.
Also Known As
Searchable PDF
Run OCR on a scanned PDF to make its text selectable and searchable.
Scan to Text
Take a photo of any document and instantly extract the text with OCR.
Merge PDF
Combine multiple PDF files into one. Drag to set the page order you want.
Split PDF
Separate one PDF into multiple files — by page range or every page.
Compress PDF
Reduce PDF file size while keeping the best possible quality.
Remove Pages
Select and delete specific pages from your PDF document.
Trusted Worldwide
iLoveDocsTools is used by students, professionals, and businesses across the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, India, and more than 100 other countries. All tools are browser-based and process files privately — your files never leave your device. Free to use, with Pro plans for unlimited access.
All processing happens directly in your browser. Your documents are never sent to any server — complete privacy guaranteed for users in the USA, Canada, UK, and worldwide.
Every tool on iLoveDocsTools is free to use. Need more? Upgrade to Pro for unlimited usage, priority access, and no daily limits. Trusted by students, freelancers, and teams across North America and Europe.
Whether you are on a Mac, Windows PC, iPhone, or Android in New York, Toronto, London, or Sydney — our tools work instantly in any modern browser.
Looking for free PDF tools in the USA? Free document converters in Canada? Online PDF editors in the UK or Australia? iLoveDocsTools offers 70+ free tools — merge PDF, split PDF, compress PDF, convert Word to PDF, Excel to PDF, JPG to PDF, and many more — all free, all instant, all private. No watermarks. No file size limits. Just free tools that work.