Extract text from an image
Pull every readable word out of a picture and copy it. The image stays on your device the whole time.
- Nothing is uploaded
- Works offline
- Open source
- No limits, no watermark
Done
Open the network tab. It stays empty.
Add files and run the tool to see every request this tab makes.
Your files are processed on this device and never sent to a server. Reload the page to clear everything from memory.
Retyping text from a picture is slow and error-prone: a long quote in a screenshot, a table in a photo of a handout, the small print on a label, a serial number on the back of a router. Optical character recognition (OCR) does it in seconds. Drop the image, press Read text, and the words appear in a box you can copy from or save as a plain text file.
Most online extractors send the picture to a server to read it. That is a poor trade when the image is a payslip, a medical letter or a chat you screenshotted. Here the recognition runs in your browser tab with Tesseract, the long-standing open-source OCR engine, so there is no upload, no account and no daily limit.
Drop a batch and every image is read in turn, each with its own copy button and .txt file. Choose Join into paragraphs when the text is going into a document, so lines that wrapped in the image flow together again.
How it works
- Drop one or more images, or tap to pick them. Photos, screenshots and scans all work.
- Keep line breaks for lists, tables and code; join them into paragraphs for running text.
- Read text, then copy the result or save it as a .txt file.
In your browser, not on a server
Your browser decodes the image (libheif or the Squoosh decoders step in for HEIC, AVIF and JPEG XL), enlarges small screenshots so letters are big enough to read, and hands the pixels to Tesseract, the open-source OCR engine first built at HP and later developed by Google, compiled to WebAssembly by tesseract.js (Apache-2.0). Its neural network model for English is served by this site and loaded the first time you run it. The text is recognised line by line inside a worker in your tab.
Compared with upload-based tools: The pictures people want text from are often private: a letter, a receipt, a bank statement, a prescription, a screenshot of a conversation. Online OCR sites upload the image to their server to read it and keep it for hours, and several limit free use or ask for an account. Here the image never leaves your device, and the page keeps working with Wi-Fi off.
Verify it yourself. Load this page, turn off Wi-Fi or switch to airplane mode, and run the tool. Or open your browser's developer tools (F12, or Cmd-Option-I on a Mac), pick the Network tab, and watch it while you convert. The panel above does the same count for you.
Questions
Can it extract text from a table?
It reads the words row by row, left to right, with spacing between columns collapsed. The numbers and labels come out correctly, but you will need to paste them into a spreadsheet and split the columns yourself.
Does it keep bold, fonts or layout?
No, the output is plain text. That is usually what you want for pasting, searching or quoting. If you need a formatted document from a PDF with selectable text, PDF to Word keeps headings and paragraphs.
Is the file uploaded anywhere?
No. There is no server in this process. The page is a static file and the work is done by code running inside your browser tab. You can load the page, turn off Wi-Fi, and it still works.
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