Extract Text From an Image (Photo to Text With OCR) 

A photo of a whiteboard, a screenshot of an error message, a page from a book, a receipt — the text is right there, but you can't select it. Optical character recognition (OCR) reads the letters in the picture and turns them into real, editable text.

01Turn a photo into text in 3 steps

1. 1
   Step 1

   Open Image to Text and drop your image, paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V or take a photo with your phone.
2. 2
   Step 2

   Choose the language of the text and the recognition mode: AI for the best accuracy, or On your device for complete privacy.
3. 3
   Step 3

   Copy the recognised text or download it as a .txt file.

02How to get the most accurate result

• Photograph the page straight on, not at an angle.
• Use good light and avoid shadows across the text.
• Make sure the text is in focus — zoom in on the preview before you shoot.
• Choose the correct language; it helps the engine recognise special characters.

03Whole documents

For multi-page scanned PDFs, use PDF OCR: it adds a searchable text layer to every page. Need the text in another language? Pass it to Translate PDF.