How to Extract Text from an Image (OCR)

You’ve got a screenshot, a photo of a page, or a scan, and the text in it is stuck as part of the picture. You can’t select it or copy it. OCR fixes that. It reads the letters in the image and turns them back into text you can paste and edit, so you don’t have to retype anything.

Pull the text out

1. Open the image to text tool.
2. Add your screenshot, scan, or photo.
3. Wait for it to read the image.
4. Copy the text it gives you.

The first scan takes a moment because the recognition engine downloads the one time. After that it’s quick, it works offline, and your image is read in your browser instead of being uploaded.

What OCR actually is

OCR stands for optical character recognition. It’s the technology that looks at the shapes in a picture, works out which letters and numbers they are, and rebuilds the text. It’s what lets your phone copy text out of a photo, and it’s the same idea here.

It’s very good on clear, printed text. It’s less reliable on messy handwriting, stylized fonts, or anything blurry, so treat those results as a rough draft you’ll tidy up.

How to get a cleaner result

The quality of what comes out depends a lot on what goes in. A few things help:

• Good lighting and focus. A sharp, evenly lit image reads far better than a dark or blurry one.
• Straight, not skewed. Line the text up so it’s roughly level. A page shot at an angle throws it off.
• Fill the frame with the text. The bigger and clearer the letters, the more accurate the read. Crop out backgrounds and clutter if you can.
• Plain over fancy. Standard fonts on a plain background beat decorative type over a busy image every time.

Always give it a quick check

Even a good scan can slip on the odd character, turning an “l” into a “1” or dropping a line. Read the result over once before you rely on it, especially for names, numbers, and anything where a small mistake matters.

Got a PDF instead?

If your text is in a PDF rather than an image, try PDF to text first. When a PDF holds real text, that tool pulls it out perfectly with no OCR guesswork. Only fall back to OCR when the PDF is really a scan, meaning an image of a page with no text layer to grab.

Common questions

Is my image uploaded anywhere? No. The recognition runs in your browser, so your image stays on your device. After the first use it even works offline.

Why is the first scan slow? The OCR engine downloads the first time you use it. Once it’s cached, later scans are fast.