A photo of a notice board, a screenshot of an error message, a scanned receipt: the words are right there, but you can't select them. This tool reads them and gives you text to copy.
How to copy text from a picture
- Add the picture above, or several. Photos from a phone (JPG and iPhone HEIC), screenshots (PNG), scans (TIFF, with all its pages), WebP, BMP and AVIF pictures all work.
- Choose the language of the text.
- Press Read the text. The text appears on the page; download it as a
.txtfile, or the searchable PDF made from your pictures.
Several pictures become one PDF, one page per picture, in the order you added them. Under
More options you can order them by file name instead (so scan 2 comes before scan 10),
or get one PDF for each picture.
What reads well
- Screenshots of apps and websites: the text is sharp and is read almost perfectly.
- Scans of printed pages at 200 dpi or more.
- Photos of documents, signs and labels, when the text is in focus, well lit and not too small in the picture. Hold the phone straight above the page.
Handwriting, text on busy backgrounds, curved labels and very small print are read poorly or not at all. When a picture has no readable text, the result says so.
Photos taken sideways
Phones store how they were held, and the picture is turned the way you see it on the phone before it is read. Pages that are still sideways or upside down in the picture itself are turned upright too.
Privacy
Pictures are read on our server and deleted: the uploads as soon as the job is done, the results after 30 minutes. Location data and the other details cameras store in photos are left out of the PDF.
More about what this tool reads and writes: OCR PDF.