Copy text from a screenshot
Get the words out of a screenshot, a chat, an error message or a slide, ready to paste.
- 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.
Screenshots are where text goes to get stuck: an error message you need to search for, a message someone sent you as an image, a slide from a video call, a passage from an app that will not let you select it. Drop the screenshot here and the text comes back as something you can copy, search and paste.
Screenshots are also some of the most private images on a phone or laptop: bank balances, conversations, email threads, work dashboards. This page reads them inside your browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, so there is nothing to delete from someone else’s server afterwards.
Screenshots are the easiest images for OCR: sharp, straight and high-contrast. Small screenshots are enlarged before reading, and transparent ones are put on white, so dark lettering on a cut-out still shows.
How it works
- Drop one or more screenshots, or paste them into a file first and pick them here.
- Keep line breaks for code, logs and chats. Join into paragraphs for articles and emails.
- Read text, then copy it with one click.
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 work with dark mode screenshots?
Yes. Light text on a dark background is read as well as dark on light. Very low-contrast text, such as grey placeholder text, may be missed.
Isn’t this built into my phone?
Newer iPhones, Android phones and Windows 11 can select text in photos, and they also work on the device. This page helps on a computer without that feature, for a batch of screenshots at once, or when you want a .txt file.
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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