How to copy text from an image

Someone sends you a screenshot of a long message. You click a photo of a notice board. A friend shares a picture of a printed page. You want the words as text, so you can copy them, edit them or search them. The tool that does this is called OCR. It reads the letters in a picture and gives them back as text.

Steps

  1. Open Image to text.
  2. Choose your picture. JPG, PNG and WEBP work, up to 25 MB.
  3. Pick the language of the words in the picture: English, Hindi, or Hindi and English mixed.
  4. Press Extract text.
  5. Read the result. Copy it, or download it as a .txt file.

The first time you use it, the page downloads the language data. That is a few MB, so it can take a moment on a slow connection. After that it is faster. Your picture is read on your own device and is not uploaded.

What makes the result better

  • Sharp pictures. If you cannot read a word when you zoom in, the tool probably cannot either.
  • Straight pages. A page that is tilted or curved at the edges gives more mistakes.
  • Good light, no glare. Shine from a window is fine. A flash that bounces off glossy paper is not.
  • Dark text on a plain background. Text over a busy photo is hard to read, for people and for machines.
  • Printed text. Handwriting is not supported well. Neat block letters sometimes work. Cursive usually does not.

Always read the result once

OCR makes small mistakes. A zero can become the letter O. An "rn" can look like an "m". Numbers like phone numbers, amounts and dates deserve a second look against the original picture before you use them.

Screenshots

Screenshots work very well, because the text is clean and sharp. If the text is small, zoom in on the phone before you take the screenshot, then crop out the parts you do not need.

Is the text in a PDF?

If you have a PDF and not a picture, try PDF to text first. Many PDFs already hold real text. If the PDF is a scan, use OCR scanned PDF instead.

What to do with the text

Paste it into a message, a document or a spreadsheet. To save it as a Word file, paste it into Text to Word and PDF. For Hindi, choose Word, not PDF.

Free tries

You can read up to three pictures a day without registering. A free registration removes the limit.

Try it now: Image to Text · OCR Scanned PDF