You've got a screenshot of a paragraph, a photo of a slide, or a scanned page — and you need the words as editable text, not a picture. Retyping it is slow and error-prone, and most 'image to text' sites want you to upload the file and sign up first.
The technology that reads text from images is called OCR (optical character recognition), and it now runs directly in your browser. That means you can pull text out of an image in seconds without uploading it anywhere.
What OCR does (and doesn't do)
OCR looks at the shapes in an image and works out which letters and words they represent, turning a picture of text into real, selectable text. It's excellent with clear, printed type — screenshots, PDFs-as-images, book pages, signs and labels.
It's not magic, though. Blurry photos, unusual decorative fonts, low contrast and — especially — handwriting are much harder, and results there will need proofreading or won't work at all.
Extract text from an image in three steps
Use the free Image to Text (OCR) tool, which recognizes the text right in your browser.
- Open the Image to Text tool and upload your screenshot, photo or scan.
- Click Extract text. The first run downloads the OCR engine (a few seconds), then a progress bar shows recognition.
- Copy the extracted text and paste it wherever you need it.
The image never leaves your device — recognition happens locally, so it's safe for screenshots of private documents.
How to get accurate results
- Use the highest-quality image you have — sharp and well-lit beats large but blurry.
- Crop to just the text you need; extra background and graphics slow things down and add noise.
- Straighten skewed photos so lines of text are horizontal.
- Prefer dark text on a light background (or vice versa) — high contrast reads best.
- Always proofread the output; OCR occasionally confuses similar characters like 0 and O, or 1 and l.
After OCR: clean up the text
OCR output often needs a quick tidy. Fix inconsistent capitalization with the Case Converter, collapse messy spacing with Remove Extra Spaces, or count what you extracted with the Word Counter.
If your source is a PDF made of scanned pages, convert the pages to images first with PDF to Image, then run each through OCR.