Image to text (OCR)
Get the words out of a photo, screenshot or scanned page, ready to copy. The image is read on this device and never uploaded.
- Nothing is uploaded
- Works offline after first use
- Open source
- No watermark · limit is your device’s memory; phones hold less
Reads the text in a photo, screenshot or scan (JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP) with OCR and lets you copy it. 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
Free, no ads. Support StayPut
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.
How it works
- Drop one or more images (JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, screenshots or scans), or tap to pick them.
- Keep line breaks as they are in the image, or join them into paragraphs for pasting into a document or an email.
- Read text. The text appears on the page with a Copy button, and each image can be saved 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 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
Can I get a Word document?
Yes. Image to Word reads the images the same way and saves the text as one .docx, one page per image. Only the text comes across, not the layout.
Is my image uploaded?
No. The text is recognised by Tesseract, the open-source OCR engine, compiled to WebAssembly and running inside this page. The engine and its English model (about 4 MB) are downloaded from this site the first time you use it, and after that first use the tool works offline. Switch off Wi-Fi after the first run and it still reads images.
How accurate is it?
Very good on printed text that is sharp and straight: screenshots, documents, scans, signs and receipts photographed head-on. It struggles with handwriting, curved or angled text, heavy shadows and decorative fonts. For a phone photo, fill the frame with the text and hold the phone parallel to the page. Always check numbers you plan to rely on.
Which languages does it read?
English, including accented Latin letters in names and places. More languages are on the way; each needs its own model of a few megabytes.
Can it read a scanned PDF?
Use OCR PDF for that: it reads every page of the scan, gives you the text, and makes the PDF itself searchable. If the PDF already has selectable text, PDF to Word gets it out faster and keeps the paragraphs.
Why is the first run slower?
The first time, your browser downloads the OCR engine and model from this site. They are cached, so after the first run it starts straight away, even offline. Reading a full page takes a few seconds on a laptop and a little longer on a phone.
More image tools
Image to Word
Turn a PNG, JPG or screenshot into a Word document you can edit. The text is read from the picture, one page per image, and the layout is not kept. Nothing is uploaded.
QR code generator
For a link, your Wi-Fi, a contact card, an email or a phone number. The code is made on this page and works forever.
Barcode generator
Type a number or text, pick the barcode type, and save the barcode as an image or a PDF. It is drawn on this page.
QR code scanner
Drop, paste or choose an image, or use your camera. The code is read on this page, and a link is shown to you, never opened for you.
Popular conversions
- Any image to JPG
- Any image to PNG
- PSD to PNG
- WebP to GIF
- PNG to GIF
- JPG to GIF
- JPG to TIFF
- PNG to TIFF
- ICO to PNG
- JPEG to JPG
- Picture to text
- Screenshot to text
- JPG to text
- PNG to text
- Extract text from image
- Image to pixel art with grid
- MP3 to text
- Audio to text
- Video to text
- Scanned PDF to text
- Compress image to 20 KB
- Compress image to 50 KB
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.