JPG is how phones and most scanners save pictures, so a lot of text ends up locked in JPG files: photographed pages, scanned letters, pictures of whiteboards and forms. Converting a JPG to text means reading those words and giving them back as text you can edit.
How to convert JPG to text
- Add one or more JPG files above.
- Choose the language the text is written in.
- Press Read the text and copy the text from the page, or download it as a
.txtfile.
With several JPGs you get one text file with each picture's text in turn, separated by page breaks, and one searchable PDF with a page per picture. The PDF keeps every JPG's picture exactly as it was (it is placed in the PDF as it is, not saved again), so a scanned document stays as sharp as the original. Camera details stored in the JPG, such as the location, are left out.
Tips for better text
- Resolution: a page photographed with a phone camera is fine; a small JPG thumbnail is not. Letters that are only a few pixels tall in the picture can't be read.
- Angle and light: photograph pages straight on, without shadows or glare. Pictures taken sideways are turned upright automatically.
- Language: choose the right one, and a second one for mixed text.
- Compression: heavily compressed JPGs (small files with blocky edges around letters) lose detail that can't be recovered; use the original from the camera or scanner when you can.
Other picture formats
PNG, TIFF, WebP, BMP, HEIC and AVIF pictures are read the same way, and so are scanned PDFs.
More about what this tool reads and writes: OCR PDF.