You can see the text in a screenshot, but you can't select it — it is locked inside an image. This free screenshot-to-text converter solves that with optical character recognition (OCR). Upload a screen capture of an error message, a chat thread, a slide, or a web page, and the tool reads the words and gives them back as plain, editable text you can copy and paste anywhere. It runs in your browser, with no software to install and no account needed.
The tool uses the open-source Tesseract OCR engine and supports roughly 12 languages. Screenshots are usually ideal input because on-screen text is sharp and high-contrast, which is exactly what OCR reads best. Typed and rendered text gives excellent results; stylized graphics or very small text can be trickier.
How to convert a screenshot to text
- Take your screenshot and save it (PNG and JPG are both fine).
- Click the upload area and choose the image file.
- Optionally select the language that matches the text on screen.
- Press Convert and wait a moment while the OCR engine reads it.
- Copy the extracted text or download it as a
.txtfile.
Why screenshots are great for OCR
Unlike a phone photo of a page, a screenshot has no glare, shadow, blur, or skew. The pixels come straight from your display, so the characters are crisp and evenly lit. That clean input is why screenshots often produce some of the most accurate OCR results. Because a screenshot is just an image, it flows through the same engine as the PNG to Text and JPG to Text tools — the quality is identical.
Why use this tool
It is completely free with no sign-up, no watermark, and no hidden limits. Privacy is built in: your uploaded file is processed and then automatically deleted afterward, so nothing lingers on a server. Whether you captured a code snippet, a receipt on screen, or a quote you want to save, you can have editable text in seconds. For any other screen capture format, the general Image to Text tool works too. For more tips, see our guide on how to extract text from a screenshot.