Stop retyping text that already exists in a picture. This free image-to-text converter uses optical character recognition (OCR) to read the words in your photo, scan, or screenshot and hand them back as plain, editable text you can copy, search, or paste anywhere. It works right in your browser, with no software to install and no account to create.
The tool is built on the open-source Tesseract OCR engine and supports roughly 12 languages, so it handles everyday documents in English and many other common scripts. Printed and typed text produces the best results; handwriting can be recognized but accuracy is limited and depends heavily on how neat and clear the writing is.
How to convert an image to text
- Click the upload area and choose an image file (JPG, PNG, WebP, and more are all accepted).
- Optionally pick the language that matches the text in your image for better accuracy.
- Press Convert and wait a moment while the OCR engine reads your file.
- Review the extracted text in the result box.
- Copy the text to your clipboard or download it as a
.txtfile.
Why use this tool
It is completely free with no sign-up, no watermark, and no usage limits hidden behind a paywall. Privacy is built in: your uploaded files are processed and then automatically deleted after processing, so nothing lingers on a server. Because everything runs through a single OCR engine, you get consistent results whether you start from a screenshot, a phone photo, or a scanned page.
If you need a more specific starting point, try the dedicated JPG to Text or PNG to Text tools, or use PDF to Text for multi-page documents. They all funnel into the same engine, so the quality is identical.
Tips for best results
Use the highest-resolution version of your image you can find — crisp, well-lit text is far easier to read than a blurry or shadowed shot. Crop out background clutter so the engine focuses on the words, and straighten any image that is tilted or skewed. For a deeper checklist, see our guide on how to improve OCR accuracy. You can also read our walkthrough on how to extract text from an image for more context.