How to Extract Text from an Image (Free OCR in Your Browser)

What Is OCR?

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the technology that recognizes letters in an image and turns them into real text you can copy, edit and search. Without OCR, a screenshot of an article or a photo of a receipt is just a grid of pixels: you can look at it, but not select a single word.

Everyday situations where OCR saves time:

• copying a quote, a code or an address from a screenshot,
• retrieving the text of a printed document photographed with your phone,
• digitizing old letters, recipes or notes typed on paper,
• extracting the content of a scanned PDF after converting its pages to images,
• grabbing text from a slide in a video conference.

Extract Text from an Image in 3 Steps

The Image to Text tool uses Tesseract.js, an open-source OCR engine, running directly in your browser. Your images are never uploaded — useful for personal documents, invoices or IDs.

1. Drop your image — JPG, PNG, WebP, BMP and most common formats.
2. Choose the language of the text: English, French or Spanish. The language model (a few MB) is downloaded the first time, then cached.
3. Copy or download the extracted text.

How to Get Accurate Results

OCR accuracy depends almost entirely on the quality of the image. On a clean screenshot, it's nearly perfect; on a blurry photo taken at an angle, errors multiply.

Factor	Good	Bad
Sharpness	Sharp, in focus	Blurry, shaky
Contrast	Dark text on light background	Grey on grey, colored backgrounds
Angle	Photographed straight on	Tilted, perspective
Lighting	Even	Shadows, reflections
Resolution	Text at least 20 px high	Tiny text
Type of writing	Printed text	Handwriting (limited)

Practical tips:

1. Photograph documents flat, from directly above, in daylight.
2. Crop the image to the text area with the crop tool — the fewer distractions, the better.
3. Rotate a sideways photo with the rotation tool before running OCR.
4. Enlarge small text: a low-resolution screenshot gives better results after a pass through the AI upscaler.

OCR on a PDF: Which Tool?

There are two kinds of PDFs:

• Text PDFs (exported from Word, a website, software): the text already exists inside. No need for OCR: use PDF to Text, which extracts it instantly and accurately.
• Scanned PDFs (photocopies, scans): each page is an image. Convert the pages to images with PDF to Image, then run them through OCR.

A simple test: if you can select a word in your PDF viewer, it's a text PDF.

Limitations to Know

• Handwriting is poorly recognized — Tesseract is designed for printed text.
• Complex layouts (multiple columns, tables) may come out in an unexpected order: always re-read the result.
• Decorative fonts and text on photos are harder to read than standard fonts.

Conclusion

OCR turns any image of text into editable text in a few seconds. For the best results, start from a sharp, straight, well-lit image and pick the right language. And since everything happens in your browser, you can use it even for sensitive documents.