Image to Text (OCR)

What it's for

Get the text out of a picture so you can copy, search or edit it: a screenshot of an error message, a photo of a sign or a receipt, or a scanned letter. The reading (optical character recognition, with Tesseract) happens in your browser, so the picture is never uploaded.

For example, when someone sends a screenshot of a long error, paste the screenshot here and copy the text into a search engine or a bug report.

How to use it

Choose, drop or paste a picture, and the text appears in the box, where you can correct it, and Copy copies it. The first time, the reader itself (about 6 MB) is loaded, which takes a moment; after that it’s kept, and Save everything for offline on the Offline page saves it ahead of time.

Choose the Language of the text first: 26 more besides English, including French, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. The list shows each one’s size; the first time you choose one, it’s downloaded from this site (most are 1 to 3 MB) and then kept on this device, so it works offline afterwards and the list says saved on this device. Only the language file is downloaded: your picture never leaves the browser. Clearing this site’s data in your browser’s settings removes the saved languages.

If the result is jumbled, change the Layout and the picture is read again: Automatic suits pages and screenshots, One block of text a paragraph, A single line one line such as a serial number, and Scattered text labels and signs. The language and layout are remembered in the browser. The message says how confident the reader is.

Example

Take a screenshot of this paragraph and paste it in. The text box shows the paragraph’s words, line by line, with a confidence of about 95%.

Good to know

One language at a time, and printed text only: handwriting is rarely read well. Japanese and Chinese are read across the page, not in vertical columns. Save everything for offline saves English only; other languages are saved the first time you use them. Small, blurred, skewed or decorative text gives mistakes (such as 0 for O or rn for m), so check the result, particularly numbers. Columns and tables come out as plain lines, and a page’s layout isn’t kept. PDFs can’t be read directly; take a screenshot of the page.