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 after first use
- Open source
- No watermark · limit is your device’s memory; phones hold less
Copy the text out of a screenshot in your browser. It is free, needs no account and adds no watermark, and your files are not uploaded: everything runs in your browser on your device. The first run downloads the text reader (about 4 MB) and the WebAssembly engine that runs it to your browser, and after that the tool works offline.
Done
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Open the network tab. Your files never appear in it.
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.
You do not have to save the screenshot as a file first. Take it to the clipboard, with Windows key+Shift+S on Windows or Shift+Command+Control+4 on a Mac, then click on this page and press Ctrl+V or Command+V. The screenshot is added as if you had dropped it. Press Read text and the words appear, with a copy button beside them.
Everything visible in the screenshot is read, including the clock and battery in the status bar, app menus and names beside chat bubbles. For a clean result, capture only the area you need rather than the whole screen. For an error message, keep line breaks as they are, and search for the most specific line rather than the whole block.
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 after your first run the page keeps working with Wi-Fi off.
Verify it yourself. Give the page a short while after your first run to save itself for offline use, then turn off Wi-Fi or switch to airplane mode and run the tool again. 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.
Can I paste a screenshot instead of dropping a file?
Yes. Copy the screenshot to the clipboard, click anywhere on this page and press Ctrl+V, or Command+V on a Mac. It is added to the list just like a dropped file. You can paste several one after another and read them all in one go.
Why is there extra text like the time and battery level?
The reader returns every piece of text it can see, and a full phone screenshot includes the status bar, headers and buttons. Delete those lines from the result, or crop the screenshot first. On a computer, capturing just a region of the screen avoids it.
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. Give the page a short while after your first run to save itself for offline use; then you can turn off Wi-Fi and it still works.
More image tools
Image to text
Get the words out of a photo, screenshot or scanned page, ready to copy. The image is read on this device and never uploaded.
Compare images
Find what changed between two pictures with a slider, a difference map or a fade, all on this device.
Image to ASCII art
Turn a picture into text characters you can copy, paste or save, made on this device.
Pixel art converter
Chunky pixels and a limited palette from any picture, previewed live and made on this device.
Other conversions
- WebP to GIF
- PNG to GIF
- JPG to GIF
- JPG to TIFF
- PNG to TIFF
- ICO to PNG
- Any image to JPG
- Any image to PNG
- JPEG to JPG
- HEIC to PNG
- Picture to text
- JPG to text
- PNG to text
- Extract text from image
- MP3 to text
- Audio to text
- Video to text
- Scanned PDF to text
- PDF to text
- Screenshot to PDF
- Watermark an ID copy
- Increase image resolution
Guides
- How to copy text from an imageiPhone, Android, Windows and Mac can all turn a photo of text into text you can select and paste. Here is how on each.
- A free TinyWow alternative that never uploads your filesTinyWow puts a lot of tools in one place, but your files go to it first. Here is what changes when they never leave your device.