Convert a picture to text
Snap a page, a sign or a whiteboard and get editable text back, without sending the picture anywhere.
- 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.
A picture of a page is easy to take and hard to use: you cannot search it, paste it into an email or edit a sentence. This page turns the picture into real text. It reads iPhone HEIC photos as well as JPG, PNG and WebP, so you can use the picture straight from your camera roll.
Pictures of paperwork tend to be personal: a letter from the bank, a prescription, a child’s homework, a recipe from a relative. The text is recognised in your browser, by an OCR engine that this page loads from its own server, so the picture itself is never uploaded or stored anywhere.
For the best result, take the photo straight on in good light, fill the frame with the text and keep it in focus. Printed text reads very well. Handwriting mostly does not, so treat anything handwritten as a rough draft to correct.
How it works
- Drop the picture, or tap to pick it from your photos. Several at once is fine.
- Choose whether to keep the line breaks from the picture or join them into paragraphs.
- Read text, then tap Copy text or save the .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 I use it on my phone?
Yes. On an iPhone or Android phone, tap the drop area and choose a photo or take one with the camera. The first run downloads the reader, about 6 MB, so start it on Wi-Fi if your data plan is tight.
Does it read handwriting?
Only neat block capitals, and not reliably. The engine is trained on printed text. For handwritten notes expect to fix a good share of the words.
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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