Image to Text

How do I convert an image to text?

Press Choose images, or paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V, or tap Take a photo on a phone. Tick the language of the text and press Read text. Each picture's words appear in a box you can edit. Press Copy to paste them anywhere, or Download for a .txt file of every picture.

1. Press Choose images (JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, GIF or BMP), drop pictures on the box, or press Ctrl+V to paste a screenshot.
2. Tick the Language of the text. Tick two if the picture mixes languages.
3. Press Read text. A picture took one to three seconds on a laptop in our tests.
4. Fix any wrong words in the box, then press Copy or Download .txt.
5. Several pictures? Copy all or Download saves them in one file, each under its file name.

How accurate is picture to text conversion?

On clear print and screenshots, very accurate: every word was right in our tests, with confidence 96%. Accuracy falls with blur and tiny text. A photo taken too far away, with letters 12 pixels tall, kept 19.4% of its words and scored 37% confidence, which the tool flags as low. Check names and numbers.

Measured on 2026-10-17 with the same engine (tesseract.js 7) and language data the tool uses, on an Intel Core i5-8350U laptop, with the tool's steps run in the same order. The pictures were made by the test with known text, then softened, tilted or turned. Accuracy counts the true words found in order. Phones are slower than laptops.

Two things in the table matter most. Straightening fixed the tilted photo: read as is, 6.5% of its words were wrong. Turning fixed the sideways photo, which read as is gave 3.2% of its words; the tool noticed the poor read (confidence 41%), tried the other three turns and kept the best one, at the cost of a few extra seconds.

How do I copy text from a screenshot?

Take the screenshot, then press Ctrl+V on this page (Command+V on a Mac) and press Read text. You do not need to save the screenshot first. In our tests, 11-pixel screen text was read correctly after the tool enlarged it, and dark mode screenshots with light text read as well as light ones.

Screen text is sharp, so it reads very well, but small letters are only a few pixels tall. When the lines found are under 22 pixels tall, the tool reads the picture again at twice the size and keeps the read it is more sure of. In our test this lifted 31-word, 11-pixel text from 96.8% to 100% of words right. A screenshot from a 2x (Retina) screen already has big enough letters.

Windows 11 can also do this for one screenshot at a time: in the Snipping Tool, press Text actions on a snip, then Copy all text. Microsoft explains it in Use Snipping Tool to capture screenshots. Use the tool above when you have several pictures, need a .txt file, or want to edit the text before copying it.

How do I extract text from an image on my phone?

Open this page in Safari or Chrome, tap Take a photo or Choose images, and pick the picture. iPhone HEIC photos work too. Tap Read text, then Copy. For the sharpest result, hold the phone straight over the page, fill the frame with the text, and keep it in good light. Nothing is uploaded from your phone.

Phones also have a built-in way to copy text from one photo. On iPhone, Live Text lets you touch and hold words in a photo, as Apple explains in Copy and translate text from photos on your iPhone or iPad. On Android, Google Lens in Google Photos selects text in a photo; see Get info about your photos and surroundings. The tool above adds a text box you can edit, a .txt download, and many pictures at once.

A photo taken from too far away is the main cause of bad results on phones: in our test, letters 12 pixels tall kept only 19.4% of the words. Move closer until the text fills the picture.

Can it read handwriting?

Poorly. The engine was trained on printed and typed text, so handwritten notes come out with many wrong words, and joined-up writing is the hardest. The confidence line under each result tells you how sure the reading was. For handwritten notes, expect to retype much of the text, and check every name and number by eye.

The tool shows a hint under each picture from the engine's average word confidence: high at 85% or more, medium from 60%, and low below that. In our tests every picture that scored 96% had all its words right, and the two reads that scored under 45% had most of their words wrong.

Which languages can it read?

It reads English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Russian. Tick every language in the picture: each one downloads once, between 0.7 and 2.9 MB, and your browser keeps it for next time. In our test, a Spanish photo read with the Spanish data came out with 100% of its 25 words right, accents included.

Pick the right language even for short text: each language's data holds its own letters and common words, which the engine uses to decide between look-alike letters.