Image to Text

How Image to Text works

Drop a photo of a document, a screenshot or a scanned page and the words in it are recognised and saved as plain text you can copy, edit and search. This is OCR, optical character recognition, done by Tesseract, the open-source engine used by many document scanners, running inside this tab.

Choose the language of the text before converting, from 64 languages: English and the main European languages, Russian, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Hebrew, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and the other major Indian scripts, Chinese, Japanese and Korean (across or down the page), Thai, Vietnamese and more. Only the model for the language you choose is downloaded, from about 0.4 MB for Persian to 5.7 MB for Sanskrit and about 3 MB for English, and it is cached for next time, as is the OCR engine of about 4 MB.

Clear printed text at a normal size reads very accurately. Results drop with handwriting, very small or decorative fonts, low light, blur and photos taken at an angle. Layout is not kept: the output is the words in reading order, with line breaks, not a copy of the page design.

Because recognition happens on your device, it is suitable for receipts, IDs, letters and other images you would rather not upload.

The text file is named after the image. Several images can be read in one go, each giving its own text file, which suits a stack of receipts or the pages of a photographed document. Accuracy is best on dark text on a light background at the size of normal print or larger. Screenshots of web pages and documents read almost perfectly, because their text is already sharp.

Image to Text options explained

When to use it

Use OCR to copy a quote from a screenshot, to get the text of a scanned letter without retyping it, to search photos of notes, to translate a sign or menu by pasting the text into a translator, or to reuse text from an image in a document.

Crop the image to just the text before converting, and take photos straight on in good light. Both make a large difference to accuracy.

About this converter

This page is a shortcut to one of the most common conversions, accepting every source format that can go to the same target. It uses the same engines as the rest of the site: ffmpeg compiled to WebAssembly for video and audio, and Tesseract for reading text from images, both running in your browser. The engines download the first time you press the button and are cached for later visits. If you know the exact formats involved, the dedicated pages, such as MP4 to GIF or JPG to TXT, explain the details of that pair, but the result from this page is the same.

Image to Text troubleshooting

"No text was recognised"

The image may be blurred, too small or in another language. Try a sharper image, crop to the text, and choose the right language.

Letters are wrong

Check the language setting, then try a higher-resolution image. Decorative fonts and handwriting are harder to read.

I need text from a PDF

If the PDF has selectable text, use PDF to TXT. If it is a scan, convert a page to JPG first and use it here.

How to use Image to Text, step by step

1. Press "Choose images" or drag files onto the box.
2. Set the options if you need to; the defaults suit most uses.
3. Press "Extract text". The work happens on your device.
4. Save the result with its download button.

Is it safe to do this online?

With most online tools, "online" means your file is uploaded to a company's server, processed there and kept for a while before it is deleted. Here it is not. The page downloads the tool's code to your browser, and your file is read and processed inside the tab on your own device. It is never sent to TapToConvert or anyone else.

You can check this yourself: once the page and its engine have loaded, turn off Wi-Fi and the tool still works. That also means there is no queue, no daily limit and no file size cap set by a server; the only limit is the memory your browser gives a single tab.