Someone sent a screenshot when you needed the actual words. Drop a photo, screenshot, or scan anywhere on this page, or paste one with Ctrl+V, and the free image to text OCR puts the text in the box below, ready to copy or save as a .txt file. No upload, no signup, and your documents are never stored or seen by anyone.
What this is good at
Clean printed text (screenshots, documents, receipts, book pages, signs) comes out nearly perfect. Handwriting is hit-or-miss (that's true of every OCR, including the paid ones). For best results: sharp photo, straight-on angle, decent light.
Why private OCR matters
The popular "image to text" sites upload your image to their servers. Think about what people OCR: leases, IDs, pay stubs, medical letters, homework. Here your image is never uploaded, stored, or seen by anyone.
FAQ
What languages does it read?
English out of the box (more languages coming; tell us which you need). The engine is Tesseract, the same OCR that powers many paid tools.
Can it do PDFs?
Scanned-PDF OCR is on the workbench. For now: screenshot the page and drop it here.
Why is the first run slow?
The OCR engine (a few MB) loads once, then it's cached. After that it's fast.