Image to Text (OCR)
Processed locally in your browser — your image never leaves this device. Uses Tesseract.js WebAssembly OCR. Accuracy may vary for handwriting or low-contrast images.
Click to browse or drag & drop an image
PNG, JPG, WebP, or BMP · Max 20 MB
Or paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V / Cmd+V
Extracted Text
No text was found in this image. Try a clearer, higher-contrast photo or a different language setting.
Tips for best results:
- Use well-lit, high-contrast images
- Horizontal machine-printed text works best
- Screenshots at 100% zoom give great results
- For mixed docs, try “English + Simplified Chinese”
- Edit the result box to fix any OCR errors
About Image to Text (OCR)
What Is Image OCR?
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) reads text from images and converts it into editable characters. This tool uses Tesseract.js, a WebAssembly port of the industry-standard Tesseract engine originally built at HP and maintained by Google. Everything runs entirely inside your browser tab — no pixels are ever sent to a server. The engine downloads once from jsDelivr CDN, gets cached by your browser, and runs locally for all subsequent uses in the same session.
Supported Languages
This tool ships with four language options:
- English — ideal for documents, screenshots, and signage in English
- Simplified Chinese (简体中文) — mainland China standard characters
- Traditional Chinese (繁體中文) — used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau
- English + Simplified Chinese — best for bilingual documents mixing both scripts
Key Features
- Clipboard paste — press Ctrl+V / Cmd+V to paste a screenshot directly without saving a file first
- Live progress bar — see engine loading and recognition progress in real time
- Editable result — fix OCR errors before copying or downloading
- Copy & download — copy to clipboard or save as a .txt file instantly
- Privacy-first — your images never leave your device; all processing is in-browser
- No sign-up required — completely free, no account or email needed
How to Extract Text from an Image
- Click Select Image or drag and drop a PNG, JPG, WebP, or BMP file onto the upload area. Alternatively, copy a screenshot to your clipboard and press Ctrl+V / Cmd+V.
- Choose the OCR Language that matches the text in your image.
- Click Extract Text. The first run downloads the OCR engine and language data; subsequent runs begin immediately.
- Review the extracted text in the result box. You can edit it directly to fix any mistakes.
- Click Copy Text to copy to your clipboard, or Download .txt to save the result as a plain-text file.
When Does OCR Work Best?
Tesseract performs best on:
- High-resolution screenshots taken at 100% zoom
- Scanned documents at 300 DPI or higher
- Dark text on a light background (or light text on a dark background with good contrast)
- Horizontal, machine-printed text in standard fonts
- Images with minimal background noise or patterns
Accuracy Note
While Tesseract is highly accurate on clean printed text, accuracy may be lower for: handwriting, heavily stylised or decorative fonts, rotated or perspective-distorted text, low-contrast or blurry images, and photos with complex backgrounds. The result text box is fully editable — review and correct the output before use. For critical applications such as legal or medical documents, always verify the extracted text against the original image.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. The OCR engine (Tesseract.js) runs entirely inside your browser tab using WebAssembly. The only network requests are to download the Tesseract library and language data from jsDelivr CDN on first use. Your actual image data never leaves your device. You can confirm this by opening DevTools → Network and observing that no image file is uploaded after clicking “Extract Text”.
The first run downloads the Tesseract WebAssembly engine (~4 MB) and the language data file (~4–10 MB) from jsDelivr CDN. These are cached by your browser, so subsequent runs in the same session skip the download and begin recognition immediately — much faster.
PNG, JPEG, WebP, and BMP files up to 20 MB are accepted. Images with any single dimension exceeding 8,000 pixels are rejected to protect browser memory. For very large scanned documents, consider downscaling to around 300 DPI before processing — Tesseract does not benefit from higher resolutions.
Yes. Copy any image to your clipboard (for example, use Ctrl+Shift+S on Windows or Cmd+Shift+4 on macOS to capture a region, or right-click → Copy Image in a browser), then press Ctrl+V (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+V (macOS) anywhere on this page. The image loads directly without needing to save it as a file first.
Tesseract achieves very high accuracy on clean, machine-printed text in well-lit, straight-on photos and scanned documents. Accuracy drops with handwriting, decorative fonts, rotated or perspective-distorted text, low contrast, blurry images, or complex backgrounds. The result box is editable so you can correct mistakes before copying or downloading.