OCR: Extract Text from an Image
Get the text out of a photo, a screenshot or a scanned document, in English, French, German or Spanish. Recognition runs in your browser: the image is never uploaded.
Text language
The first reading downloads the engine and the language (about 5 MB), then kept in cache. Words in orange are uncertain: check them. For a PDF, first turn its pages into images with the tool PDF to images.
Engine: Tesseract OCR (Apache 2.0), served from this site. Licences
Your images stay in your browser: they are never uploaded or stored.
About this tool
This OCR (optical character recognition) tool reads the text in an image and turns it into editable text: a photo of a menu, a screenshot, a receipt, a scanned page, a label… It recognises English, French, German and Spanish, including accents.
Recognition runs entirely in your browser with the open-source Tesseract engine, hosted on this site: your images are never uploaded. You can process several images in a row, rotate an image, improve its legibility and see the recognised words right on the image, with uncertain words highlighted in orange.
- Text extracted from a photo, screenshot or scan
- English, French, German and Spanish, alone or combined
- Several images in a row
- Automatic enhancement: grey, contrast, upscaling
- Recognised words shown on the image, uncertain ones in orange
- Editable text, copy and TXT export, no upload
How to use it
- Import or paste one or more images.
- Tick the text language and choose the layout if needed.
- Click “Read the text”.
- Check the words in orange, then copy the text or download it.
Frequently asked questions
Why does the recognised text contain errors?
OCR depends on how sharp the image is: a blurry, tilted or low-contrast photo, or handwriting, gives poorer results. Rotate the image, turn on enhancement or crop to the text.
Can it read a PDF?
First turn the PDF pages into images with the PDF to images tool, then import them here.
Is handwriting recognised?
Tesseract is made for printed text; handwriting is usually not recognised well.
Are my images uploaded?
No, the engine runs in your browser; only the engine and the language are downloaded from this site on first use.