Image → Text (OCR)
Extract text from images using Tesseract.js OCR engine — runs entirely in your browser. Supports JPEG, PNG, WebP, BMP, and more.
Drop an image here or click to browse
JPEG, PNG, WebP, BMP supported
Extract Text from Any Image Using Browser-Native OCR: No Upload Required
Optical character recognition used to require expensive desktop software or cloud APIs that sent your documents to remote servers. AlteredIdea's Image to Text tool bundles Tesseract.js: a WebAssembly port of the Tesseract OCR engine: directly in the browser. Drop a photo of a document, a screenshot with text, a scanned receipt, or a sign in any of eight supported languages and Tesseract extracts the text locally without any image ever leaving your device.
The recognised text appears in a copyable text area alongside word and character counts. A real-time progress bar shows each recognition stage so you know how long to expect on large or complex images. For best results use a high-resolution image with good contrast between text and background: the tool performs particularly well on printed documents, typed text, and clean screenshots.
How to use: step by step
- 1Upload or drop your image
Select any image that contains text: a photo of a document, a screenshot, a scanned page, or a sign. - 2Choose the language
Select the language of the text in the image. Choosing the correct language significantly improves accuracy. - 3Click Extract Text
Hit the Extract Text button. A progress bar shows the recognition stages as Tesseract.js processes the image in your browser. - 4Review the extracted text
The recognised text appears in an editable read-only area. Check word count and character count at the bottom. - 5Copy to clipboard
Click the Copy button to copy all extracted text to your clipboard for pasting into a document, spreadsheet, or any app.
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Frequently Asked Questions
- Is my image uploaded to a server for OCR processing?
- No. Tesseract.js runs entirely inside your browser using WebAssembly. The image is never sent to any server: everything happens locally on your device.
- Which languages are supported?
- English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, Arabic, and Korean. Tesseract.js downloads the relevant language data file from a local bundle on first use.
- How accurate is the text extraction?
- Accuracy depends heavily on image quality. High-contrast, clearly printed text on a plain background achieves near-perfect results. Handwriting, low-resolution scans, heavily stylised fonts, or tilted text will produce more errors.
- What image formats are supported?
- JPEG, PNG, WebP, BMP, and most other formats your browser can decode. Tesseract.js accepts anything the browser can render on a canvas element.
- Why is recognition slow on first use?
- On the first run Tesseract.js downloads the OCR engine (a WebAssembly binary) and the selected language data. This may take a few seconds on a slow connection. Subsequent runs use the cached files and are much faster.
- Can it read text from screenshots or PDFs?
- Yes for screenshots: drop the PNG or JPEG directly. For PDFs, take a screenshot of the page first, then run it through the tool.
- Does it work with handwritten text?
- Tesseract.js is trained on printed text and has limited accuracy with cursive or handwriting. For clearly written block letters it may still produce useful results, but expect more errors than with printed text.
- Is there a file size or page limit?
- No server-side limits. Very large images may use significant browser memory. For best performance keep images under 10 MB and 4000px on the longest side.
- Is the tool free?
- Completely free, no account, and no limit on the number of images you process.
AlteredIdea vs alternatives
vs Google Drive OCR / OneDrive: Those services upload your documents to cloud servers. AlteredIdea runs Tesseract.js entirely in your browser: your files are never transmitted anywhere.
vs ABBYY FineReader / Adobe Acrobat OCR: No installation, no licence fee. Open a browser tab on any device and extract text in seconds.
vs paid OCR APIs: Completely free with no per-page billing, no API key, and no account required. Process as many documents as you need.