Extract the text visible in images, photos and PDFs into text you can copy. Process several files at once. Recognition runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Your files are never sent to a server (the text-recognition engine itself is downloaded from a third-party site the first time you use this tool)
The first run downloads the recognition engine, which takes a moment (faster after that). Handwriting and heavily tilted photos are recognized less reliably — this works best with printed text photographed straight-on.
Technically known as OCR (optical character recognition), this tool runs a widely-used open-source recognition engine (Tesseract) directly inside your browser. Text comes out without your files ever being uploaded anywhere.
| Works well | Struggles |
|---|---|
| Printed text (books, documents, screenshots) | Handwriting |
| Straight, front-on photos | Heavily tilted or distorted photos |
| Bright images with clear contrast | Dark, blurry, or low-resolution images |
For PDFs, each page is rendered as an image before recognition. If your PDF already has selectable text (a "digital" PDF), it's faster and more accurate to copy directly from a PDF viewer — this tool shines on scanned paper documents saved as image-based PDFs.