Why is the first run slow?

Because the English training data is several megabytes and has to be downloaded once. It is far too large to commit to the site, so it comes from the Tesseract project's own host and your browser caches it. Every run after that starts immediately.

Why did it find no text, or the wrong text?

OCR needs sharp, level, high-contrast text. The usual culprits are a photo taken at an angle, a low-resolution screenshot that has been scaled up, text over a busy background, and handwriting — which this cannot read at all. Re-taking the photo straight-on, in good light, fixes most failures.

Not here — this takes an image. Use the OCR PDF tool for a PDF, which handles the page rendering first. If you only need one page, screenshotting it and using this is quicker.

OCR Image to Text

Drop in a screenshot, a photo of a page or a scan, and get the text out of it. The recognition runs in your browser using Tesseract, so the picture never leaves your machine — which matters, because the images people need text from are usually a screenshot of something private, a photo of a contract, or a scan of an ID.

Recognised text

The image is read in your browser and never uploaded. The English language data is fetched once from the Tesseract project the first time you run it, and cached by your browser after that.

Nothing is uploaded — this tool runs inside your browser, so your files never leave your device.

Help us improve

Why use this tool

The image is read in your browser and never uploaded
PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF and BMP, up to 25MB
Shows real progress, including the one-off language download
Copy the text or download it as a .txt

How it works

1Choose an image, or drag one onto the box.
2Press Extract text and wait — the first run downloads the language data.
3Copy the result, and check the digits before you rely on them.

OCR Image to Text — frequently asked questions

No. Tesseract runs as a Web Worker inside this page, so the image data stays in your browser. The only network request is for the English language data the first time you use it, which is a shared data file and contains nothing about your image.

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