Extract Text from Image

How to Extract Text from Image Files

1. 1

   Add an image

   Choose a picture, drop it on the tool, paste a screenshot, or take a photo on a phone.

2. 2

   Check the language

   English is the default, so pick another language from the list if your text is not English.

3. 3

   Copy or download

   Edit the text if you like, then press Copy text or save it as a .txt file.

Image to Text Converter

This image to text converter reads the words in a picture and gives them back as plain text. Add a JPG, PNG or screenshot, and the text shows up in a box after a few seconds per image. You can edit it, copy it or save it as a .txt file. Your picture stays in your browser.

Before it reads, the tool tidies each picture. It straightens a small tilt, evens out shadows and uneven light, and turns dark-mode screenshots into dark text on a light background. Small print is enlarged and read a second time. Photos larger than 12 megapixels are scaled down.

• Up to 10 images at once, in JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, GIF, BMP or AVIF. Each can be up to 100 MB on a computer and 30 MB on a phone.
• The first use downloads about 4 MB into your browser: the reading software and the English language file. Your image is not uploaded. Phones are slower than computers.
• Printed and typed text reads well. Handwriting does not. Neat block letters sometimes come through with mistakes, and joined-up handwriting mostly does not.
• Blurry pictures, very small print and text next to a hard shadow edge read poorly.
• A photo taken at a steep angle, or text that lies sideways or upside down, reads poorly. The tool straightens a small tilt only.
• Pages with columns or tables: the words are read, but the order of columns can get mixed and the table layout is lost.
• The result is plain text. Fonts, bold, sizes, tables and pictures are not kept.
• One language per run. An animated GIF is read as its first frame.

Need the words from a PDF instead? Use PDF to text, which also reads scanned pages.

Extract Text from Image: Get a Clean Read

A sharp, straight, evenly lit picture gives the cleanest text. Hold your phone straight above the page, fill the frame with the page, and avoid shadows across the words. Pick the language the text is written in. These four habits matter more than anything else.

If a photo of a page is crooked or has a messy background, straighten and crop it first with the online document scanner. It saves a PDF, and PDF to text reads that. If the text here looks wrong, change the language above the text box. The same images are read again, so you do not need to add them twice.

Screenshot to Text

To copy text from a screenshot, copy the screenshot, then press Ctrl+V or Cmd+V anywhere on this page. The tool reads it right away. There is no button to press. You can also choose a screenshot file, or add several at once.

With several images, the text of each one stands under a line with its file name, all in one box and one .txt file. If a screenshot shows private details, cover them first with Redact Image. To turn the text into a document afterward, try text to PDF.

Image to Text Languages

The tool reads one language per run. English is the default, and you pick another from the list on the tool. Choose the language the text is written in. A wrong choice gives odd letters, and changing it reads the same images again.

This tool reads English, Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Each extra language is a small file of 1 to 3 MB that your browser downloads the first time you use it.

Chinese, Japanese and Korean are read left to right as one column, with more mistakes than Latin scripts. Vertical text is not read.

Image to Text on Your iPhone

When the page is in front of you, skip the web page. On your iPhone, Filewise has an Extract Text scan mode that reads the text on a page in up to 25 languages. Some languages need a newer version of iOS. Copy the text, or export it as .txt or as a Word file.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• Tesseract: Improving the quality of the output
• Tesseract OCR on GitHub

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