Free Image to Text Converter

No. The OCR engine runs entirely in your browser as WebAssembly, and the engine files themselves are served from this website rather than a third party. Your images and PDFs are read on your own device and the text never leaves it. That makes it safe to use on contracts, IDs, invoices and anything else you would not hand to a random website.

The OCR engine and its English language model add up to about 14 MB, and your browser downloads them the first time you extract text. After that they are cached, so later runs start in a moment. The recognition itself usually takes a few seconds per page, depending on your device.

Sharp, straight, well lit images of printed text on a plain background. Scans and screenshots are ideal. Photos work too if the text is in focus and not at a steep angle. Small, blurry or low contrast text is where accuracy drops, so if you can rescan at a higher resolution or retake the photo closer, do that first.

Not reliably. The engine is trained on printed text, so neat block capitals sometimes come out and cursive almost never does. Heavily stylised fonts, watermarks and text over busy photos are also hit and miss. For printed documents, though, accuracy is usually very good.

English, for now. The language model for each script is a separate download of several megabytes, so this tool ships with English to stay quick. Text in other languages will come out garbled rather than translated, since OCR reads letters, it does not translate.

A scanned PDF is really a stack of photographs wrapped in a PDF, which is why you cannot select text in it. This tool draws each page back into an image, runs OCR on every page in turn, and stitches the results together with page markers. That is exactly the case OCR exists for.

No, and OCR would be the slow way to do it. If you can select and copy text in your PDF viewer, the text is already in the file, and our PDF to Word converter will pull it out faster and more accurately than any OCR pass.

On a clean scan of printed text, expect well above ninety percent of characters to come out right, often close to all of them. Accuracy falls with blur, skew, low resolution, unusual fonts and busy backgrounds. Always give the output a quick read before you rely on it, especially numbers.

No hard limit. Everything runs on your own device, so the practical limit is your machine. Very large images and long PDFs simply take longer, and each page is processed one at a time so memory use stays sensible.

Usually one of four reasons: the text is too small in the frame, the image is blurry, the text is at an angle, or it is handwriting or a decorative font. Crop tighter so the text fills more of the image, straighten it, and try again. A higher resolution scan beats any amount of software cleverness.

Yes. A free tool is right for the occasional scan, but if your team keys in data from invoices, forms or delivery notes every day, that pipeline can be automated end to end, with OCR feeding directly into your systems. Building that kind of document workflow and business software is part of what we do at Techliphant.