How to Extract Text From an Image or Screenshot
A photo of a receipt, a screenshot of an error message, a picture of a page from a book: the words are right there, but you cannot copy them, because to the computer they are just pixels. Optical character recognition (OCR) reads the letters and gives them back as text you can paste anywhere. This guide shows how to do it on any device, and how to get a clean result.
Extract text in the browser
Open OCR Image, add one or more pictures (JPG, PNG, HEIC and other formats work), pick the language of the text and press Get the text. The words appear on screen with a count of how many were found, ready to copy into an email, a spreadsheet or a note. It reads English, Arabic, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese (Simplified).
Built-in options on your device
Recent iPhones and Android phones can select text in photos directly (on iPhone this is called Live Text), and Windows 11's Snipping Tool can copy text from a screenshot. They are handy for a line or two. For a batch of images, another language, or a whole page, a dedicated OCR tool is usually faster and more reliable.
Get a cleaner result
Shoot the page straight on, in even light, with the text filling most of the frame. Glare on glossy paper and crumpled receipts cause most errors. If a photo is faint or grainy, Image Quality Enhancer can sharpen it first. If the result looks like random characters, check that the right language is selected and run it again. Printed text works far better than handwriting.
Several pages? Use OCR PDF
For a document of many pages, put the photos into one file with Image to PDF and run OCR PDF. You keep a PDF that looks the same but now has searchable, selectable text on every page. If the PDF already has real text (you can select words in it), you do not need OCR: PDF to Text copies it out directly.