Live
OCR a PDF
Make scanned PDFs searchable
Image to Text (OCR)
LiveScreenshot, receipt, book page: read the text out of a picture so you can stop retyping it. Paste the image straight from your clipboard, pick the language it is written in, and copy the text back out of the page.
What it does
- Paste a screenshot from the clipboard, or drop a file
- 13 languages, picked per image so the accents come back right
- One image a job, up to 50 MB, deleted from our server within the hour
Your files
Gone within the hour.
Files are uploaded over HTTPS, used only to run this tool, and deleted from our server automatically about an hour later. Never sold, never used to train anything.
How to convert an image to text
Add the picture
Paste a screenshot straight from your clipboard, drop a file onto the page, or click to browse. One image a job, up to 50 MB. JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, WebP, TIFF and the HEIC photos an iPhone takes are all accepted. A photo carrying the rotate flag your phone wrote is straightened before it is read, because sideways text is text the reader does not find at all.
Pick the language
What language is the text in? sets which of the 13 readers runs, and it defaults to English. This is the one setting worth getting right: the reader is trained per language, so a Spanish page read as English comes back with the accents wrong rather than coming back empty.
Press Read the text
The image uploads, with a progress bar you can cancel, and the reading itself usually takes a second or two. Nothing is installed and there is no account.
Copy it or download it
The text appears in the page, so Copy text puts the whole thing on your clipboard without a download. Download text.txt saves it as a UTF-8 file instead, and Read another clears the stage for the next picture.
Frequently asked questions
How do I convert an image to text for free?
Paste or drop one picture onto the page, choose the language the text is written in, and press Read the text. It runs online with no account and nothing to install. The text comes back in the page where you can copy it with one button, or download it as a plain UTF-8 .txt file. It is free and there is no watermark.
Which image formats can I read text out of?
JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, WebP, TIFF, and HEIC or HEIF, which is what an iPhone saves photos as by default. A file that is not one of those is refused at upload rather than failing later. Screenshots are the easiest case because they are already sharp: a PNG straight from the clipboard reads better than a photograph of the same screen.
What are the limits, and is there a daily cap?
One image per job, up to 50 MB. There is no daily cap on this tool: unlike Video to Text and Subtitle Generator, which share five speech jobs a day, reading an image only carries the site's ordinary rate limit of 20 requests a minute from one connection, so a long run of screenshots is fine. Your image and the text it produced are deleted from our server automatically about an hour after the job, so save anything you need.
Which languages can it read?
Thirteen: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Chinese (Simplified) and Japanese. You pick one per image rather than the tool guessing, because the reader is trained per language and the right choice is what makes accented and non-Latin characters come back correctly. An image mixing two languages is read with the one you chose, so it is worth running twice if both halves matter.
Why does it say no readable text was found?
That message means the reader got fewer than three characters out of the picture, so the tool tells you rather than handing you an empty file. Small, blurred, angled or low-contrast writing is the usual cause, and a sharper or straighter photo normally fixes it. It is built for printed and typed text: handwriting is not what these readers are trained on.
Should I use this or OCR PDF?
Use this one when what you have is a picture and what you want is the words. Use OCR PDF when what you have is a scanned PDF and you want it to stay a PDF: it puts an invisible text layer back under the scan so the document becomes searchable and selectable, rather than handing you the text on its own. If you have a PDF that already has real text in it and you just want that text out, PDF to Text is the faster route, because it reads what the file already stores instead of looking at the pixels.