Image to Text (OCR)
Extract text from images with OCR online for free, right in your browser. Supports 10 languages including Arabic, Hindi, and Chinese, private, no uploads.
About This Tool
Turn a photo, screenshot, or scanned document into text you can copy and edit. An OCR engine running inside your browser reads the words in your image and returns them as a plain .txt file. Ten languages are supported, including Arabic, Hindi, and Chinese. Your image is never uploaded, only the recognition model is downloaded once.
How To Use
- Drop your image into the upload zone or click to select it.
- Pick the language of the text in the image.
- Click "Extract Text" and wait, the first run downloads the OCR engine.
- Download the .txt file with the recognised text.
How It Works
The image is passed directly to Tesseract, a mature open-source OCR engine compiled to WebAssembly, without needing any rasterisation step since the input is already a raster image. Tesseract segments the picture into lines and words, matches the shapes against a trained model for your chosen language, and returns the recognised text.
The first run for a language downloads that language's recognition model, a few megabytes, and the browser caches it for later use. Recognition is CPU-heavy: expect anywhere from under a second to several seconds depending on image size and text density.
Everything happens on your device. The image itself is never sent anywhere; only the language model, which contains no information about your file, is fetched once from the OCR engine's own servers.
Frequently Asked Questions
What image quality works best?
Clear, well-lit, high-resolution photos of printed text give the best results. Blurry photos, low contrast, unusual fonts, or handwriting are much harder to recognise accurately.
Does this read handwriting?
Not reliably. Tesseract is trained primarily on printed text; handwriting recognition accuracy is much lower and inconsistent.
Why is the first run slow?
The OCR engine and the language model download the first time you use a language. After that, the browser serves them from cache and later runs start immediately.
What languages are supported?
English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic, Hindi, and Chinese (Simplified).
Is my image uploaded anywhere?
No. The image is read and recognised entirely in your browser. Only the language model is downloaded, and it contains no data about your file.