How to copy text from an image
Image to Text reads printed English words in a picture and turns them into text you can copy, edit and paste. This is called OCR.
- Add a photo, a screenshot or a scanned PDF. You can also paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V. Up to 10 pictures at once.
- Press Get the text. The first time, the text reader loads into your browser, which takes a few seconds.
- Check the text in the box. You can fix any mistakes there, and make the letters bigger or smaller to read it more easily.
- Press Copy text, or download it as a text file.
When you add several pictures, each one gets its own heading in the result, so you can tell which text came from where.
Scanned PDF to text
Old notices, scanned books and documents sent by photocopier are often PDFs made of pictures, so you can't select the words. Add the PDF here and each page is read like a photo, up to 20 pages. For a longer file, only the first 20 pages are read, so split it first with Split PDF. A password-protected PDF has to be unlocked before it can be read.
If you can already select the words in a PDF, it has real text, and you don't need OCR at all.
Free OCR online on your device, and checking the result
The reading happens inside your browser. Your pictures and PDFs are not uploaded; only the reader itself is downloaded once from our site. That makes this picture to text converter suitable for letters, bills and study notes you would rather keep to yourself. Students use it to copy quotes from a textbook photo, and office staff use it to pull text out of a scanned letter without typing it again.
OCR is rarely perfect, so read the text once before using it. Look out for numbers and similar-looking letters, such as 0 and O, 1 and l, or rn and m, especially in phone numbers, roll numbers and amounts. Line breaks follow the picture, so a paragraph may come out as several short lines; join them in the box before you copy. Tables come out as plain lines of text rather than cells, so a price list may need tidying in a spreadsheet afterwards. If you need the result as a document, paste it into Word or Google Docs and save it from there.