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Image to Text Free — OCR Online in English

Retyping the words from a photo of a notice, a page of a book or a screenshot is slow, and every retyped line is a chance to make a mistake. This free image to text tool, also called OCR, reads the printed English words in your image and gives them back as plain text that you can copy, paste or download. It is useful when you need a quote from a printed page, the details from a photographed receipt, or the text of a slide you only have as a picture. The OCR engine itself is loaded from this site when you press the button, and the first time you use it, the English language data, about 10 MB, is downloaded from the public Tesseract CDN so the engine can read your image. Best on clean, straight, high-contrast print. Handwriting, low-resolution photos, multi-column pages and tables will contain errors, so always proofread the result before you rely on it.

How to Use

1. Add your image. Click the drop zone and choose one image file, or drag it straight from your computer into the box. Its name and size appear below, with a small preview so you can check you picked the right picture. Files larger than 10 MB are not accepted.
2. Click Read Text From Image. The tool loads the OCR engine from this site, and on first use it also downloads the English language data, about 10 MB, from the public Tesseract CDN. The progress bar and the status line show what is happening, so wait for it to finish.
3. Read the recognised text. The words appear in the box below, with the character and word counts in the result panel. Fix any mistakes before you use the text anywhere important.
4. Copy or download it. Click Copy Text to put the whole text on your clipboard for pasting elsewhere, or Download .txt to save it as a plain text file with the same name as your image.

Worked Example

Suppose you have a clean, printed image, a white page photographed straight on in good light, with the words HELLO WORLD printed in large, dark letters. Add the image and click Read Text From Image. The first run takes a little longer while the English language data downloads, about 10 MB, and the progress bar moves as the engine loads and reads the page. The expected result is that the text box contains exactly the words HELLO WORLD, and the result panel shows 11 characters, including the space, and 2 words. That count is a quick check that nothing was missed: if the box is empty or shows only part of the words, the photo may be tilted, blurry or too dark.

Why Read Text in Your Browser?

Most online OCR tools ask you to upload your image to a remote server, where you have no control over how long it is kept or who can see it. That is a real risk when the picture shows a receipt, a letter, a medical note or a personal document. This tool takes the opposite approach: the reading code runs on your own device, inside your browser, and the image never travels to a server at all. The only download is the language data the engine needs, about 10 MB from the public Tesseract CDN on first use, which contains no part of your image. The trade-off is that your device does the work, so a very large photo may take a few seconds longer on an older phone.

Tips for Accurate OCR

Start with the best photo you can take: hold the camera straight above the page, fill the frame with the text, and use bright, even light with no shadows across the words. Best on clean, straight, high-contrast print. Handwriting, low-resolution photos, multi-column pages and tables will contain errors, so always proofread. If a line comes out wrong, try again with a sharper photo, or crop the image to just the text you need, because a smaller, clearer picture often reads better than a wide shot of a whole desk. Avoid tilted pages and curved book pages where you can, since the engine reads straight lines best. Always check names, numbers and dates against the original image before you send the text on.

Frequently Asked Questions