Extract text from an image

Runs on your device — nothing is uploaded

A photo of a page, a screenshot of a message, a picture of a receipt: what you need is the words, not the picture. This reads the text inside the image and hands it back as something you can copy, edit and search.

How it works

1. Add the imageDrop a photo, a screenshot or a scan. PNG, JPG or WEBP — anything your browser can open.
2. Press Extract textThe first run downloads about 6 MB of recognition engine, once. Your browser keeps it after that.
3. Copy or downloadThe words land in a box you can edit and copy, or save as a plain .txt file.

What it reads well, and what it does not

Clean, straight, well-lit text comes back close to perfect — a screenshot, a printed page photographed flat, a receipt held square to the camera. The engine looks at the shape of each letter and matches it against a model of English, so it does best when the letters are large, sharp and level.

It struggles, and you should expect it to, with handwriting; with photographs taken at an angle or in poor light; with very small print; and with columns, where two blocks of text sit side by side and the reading order becomes a guess. None of those are faults to be fixed — they are where this class of tool stops being reliable, and it is better to know before you trust the output.

One consequence is worth stating on its own. If your document is already a digital PDF, do not put it through here. A digital PDF contains its own text, which can be copied out exactly, with no recognition step and no mistakes at all. This tool exists for the case where the words only exist as pixels.

Why the first run takes longer

Recognition needs a real engine — the same Tesseract that desktop scanning software uses, compiled to run inside a browser tab — plus a model of the English language. Together that is about six megabytes, and it is the only place on this site where the first click is not immediate.

It is downloaded once, only on this page, and only after you press the button. Your browser keeps it, so every run after the first starts straight away. It is served from this site rather than from somebody else's server, which is what keeps the promise on the rest of the page intact: once it has loaded you can switch the network off and recognition keeps working, and your image is never sent anywhere at any point.

Questions

Is my image uploaded?

No. The image is read into the page, turned into pixels, and compared against a language model that is already on your device. Nothing is transmitted. You can confirm it in your browser's network tab, or disconnect from the internet after the first run and watch it keep working.

Does it work on a PDF?

Not directly. If the PDF is digital, its text can be copied straight out and you should not use this tool at all. If it is a scan — a picture of a page, wrapped in a PDF — convert it with the PDF to Images tool and drop the resulting image here.

What languages does it read?

English only. The language model is what decides this, and each extra language would multiply the download. If you point it at a page in another language it will return English words that resemble the shapes it sees, which is worse than returning nothing — so it is better to say so here.

How accurate is it?

On a clean screenshot or a flat scan, close to exact. On a phone photograph of a page, usually readable with a few mistakes. On handwriting, not usable. Treat the result as a draft to check rather than a finished transcript.

Can I read several images at once?

Yes. Add as many as you like and they are read one after another, with each file's name above its text so nothing gets mixed up.

Does it keep a copy of my image?

No. Nothing is stored — not by this page and not anywhere else. Close the tab and the image and the text are both gone.

Does it work with no internet connection?

Yes, once the engine has been downloaded the first time. Recognition never needs the network, which is the point.

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