Extract text from images — free

Yes — you can extract text without creating an account, and there is no watermark on the output. The free tier includes a generous daily allowance that covers everyday OCR use; very heavy or bulk usage is where a paid plan helps. Your images are processed on our servers and deleted automatically after the text is extracted.

For sharp, well-lit text our OCR engines hit 95%+ accuracy. On blurry phone snaps the result drops, so retake the photo with steady hands and even lighting whenever possible. Cropping out borders, rotating the image upright, and switching between Engine 1 (fast) and Engine 2 (better on stylised fonts) usually recovers the rest of the lost characters.

The engine supports 60+ languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Russian and more. For bilingual receipts, contracts and signs, pass two language codes (for example eng+fra) so the model considers both scripts and chooses the right characters per word.

Yes. App screenshots, website captures, chat exports, exam questions, invoices, prescription labels, ID cards and product packaging all work as long as the text is readable to a human. The OCR copes well with anti-aliased UI fonts and PDF page exports, making it a quick alternative to retyping text from images for emails, notes or research.

Clean printed and typed text is the strongest use case. Neat block-letter handwriting works in Engine 2 mode, but cursive or messy handwriting is unreliable — for that, use our dedicated Handwriting OCR tool which is tuned specifically for handwritten notes, prescriptions and journals.

After the OCR finishes you can copy the full extracted text with one click, download it as a plain .txt file, or pipe it into our Image to Word converter for a fully editable .docx. The plain text view preserves line breaks so headings, lists and paragraphs survive the round-trip into your editor.

Uploads are processed in a temporary working directory and automatically deleted within minutes of the OCR finishing. We never use your images to train models, never share them with third parties, and never add watermarks. That makes the tool safe for confidential documents like invoices, prescriptions, contracts and personal correspondence.

Yes. The OCR runs in any mobile browser, so you can snap or upload a photo on your phone and copy the extracted text back in seconds, with no app to install. Handy for grabbing text off a printed page, a sign, or a whiteboard while you are on the go.

Open the Language picker in Settings and choose the language your image's text is written in — this is separate from picking the OCR engine and directly affects character recognition. The list automatically filters to only the languages supported by your currently selected engine, so switching engines can reset an unsupported language back to English.

Formatted view preserves the original line breaks, spacing and layout position of text as it appeared in the image — useful for tables, forms and columns. Plain view strips that positioning into clean, reflowing paragraphs, which is better when you just want to paste the words into an email or document without leftover line breaks. The toggle only appears when the two versions actually differ.

Start with Default and the correct Language picker setting for a quick pass; if characters are still misread, switch to Engine 2, which handles handwriting and stylised fonts better, and click Re-run extraction. For clean printed text in a supported language, Engine 1 is usually faster with equivalent accuracy.

No — the result box is fully editable so you can fix a misread word or line before copying it, and the Copy button always copies exactly what's on screen. The Download button, however, saves the original .txt file generated by the OCR pass, not your on-screen edits. If you need the corrected version saved to disk, edit the text, copy it, then paste it into a new file with your own editor.

You can drop the HEIC or HEIF file straight in — the upload accepts PNG, JPG, WEBP, GIF, TIFF, BMP, HEIC and HEIF, so an unconverted iPhone photo works exactly like any other image format. The browser decodes it before OCR runs, so there's no separate conversion step needed first.

It re-runs automatically the moment you change the Engine dropdown or the Language picker, replacing the on-screen result with a fresh extraction under the new setting. Re-run extraction is there for retrying the same settings again — useful after a failed pass or a flaky connection — rather than being a required step after every dropdown change.