Convert PNG to text
Read the text in PNG images, diagrams and screenshots, and copy it out, all on your device.
- 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.
PNG is the format for screenshots, exported slides, diagrams and scans saved without compression, so its text is usually crisp and an easy read for OCR. Drop a PNG here and its words come back as plain text you can copy or save.
PNGs with transparent backgrounds, like logos or text cut out of a design, are placed on white first so dark lettering does not vanish into a black background. Small images are enlarged before reading.
Everything runs in your browser. Diagrams from work, screenshots of documents and exported slides stay on your machine; the page does not upload them, and it keeps working after you go offline.
How it works
- Drop one or more PNG files, or tap to pick them.
- Keep line breaks, or join them into paragraphs.
- Read text, then copy it or save the .txt files.
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
Does it read text in diagrams and charts?
It reads labels, titles and legends, but not the shapes or the connections between them. Text at an angle, such as a rotated axis label, is often skipped.
Why convert a PNG to text instead of keeping the image?
Text is searchable, a fraction of the size, can be edited and read aloud by a screen reader, and pastes into anything.
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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