Image to Text: Free OCR Online

Optical character recognition (OCR) turns the text you see in a picture into text you can select, copy, search and edit. Instead of retyping a scanned letter, a photographed whiteboard, a screenshot of an error message or a quote from a book page, you let the computer read it for you.

This Image to Text converter uses the Tesseract OCR engine, running entirely in your browser. It recognises 12 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Hindi. Choose Fast mode for clean screenshots, or Accurate mode, which applies extra preprocessing for photos and difficult images. The result shows the extracted text with its confidence score and character, line and paragraph counts, and can be copied or downloaded as plain text, JSON or Markdown.

How to use the Image to Text Converter (OCR)

1. Upload an image, screenshot or photo of a document. Sharp, well-lit images with good contrast give the best results.
2. Select the Language of the text and choose Fast or Accurate mode.
3. Start the recognition and watch the progress bar; the first run of a language takes a little longer while its data loads.
4. Review the extracted text, optionally remove line breaks or change case, then copy it or download it as TXT, JSON or Markdown.

What you can do with OCR

• Digitising paper documents such as letters, invoices and printed forms.
• Copying text from screenshots, error dialogs and images where selection is impossible.
• Notes and whiteboards photographed in meetings or lectures.
• Foreign-language text that you want to paste into a translator.

Fast vs Accurate mode

Fast mode sends the image to the OCR engine unchanged, which is ideal for clean screenshots and digital text. Accurate mode first converts the image to high-contrast grayscale, which helps with photos of paper, uneven lighting and faint print, at the cost of a little more time. If one mode gives poor results, try the other before retaking the photo.

Output formats

Plain text keeps the recognised lines as they are. The formatted option tidies blank lines into clean paragraphs, Markdown separates paragraphs for pasting into notes and documentation, and JSON returns the text together with the language and confidence score for use in scripts.

OCR accuracy depends on the image. Printed text in a common font usually comes out almost perfectly; handwriting, decorative fonts, very small text or skewed photos produce more errors, so always proofread important results.

Private, free and fast

Recognition runs in your browser with the open-source Tesseract OCR engine. The first time you use a language, its recognition data is downloaded once from a public CDN; your image itself is never uploaded and stays on your device. There is no sign-up and no limit.