Images

Read the text out of a picture

Optical character recognition, running here rather than on somebody's server. It works well on screenshots and flat scans of printed type, less well on photographs taken at an angle, and not at all on handwriting — and it shows you which words it was unsure of instead of hiding the doubt.

On this device

Choose a picture

A screenshot or a flat, well-lit scan gives the best result. The recogniser is downloaded the first time you use this tool, which takes a moment.

    Opened on this device · never transmitted

    What this tool does, exactly

    What it does
    Finds the lines and words in the picture, measures the shape of each character, and proposes the text most likely to have produced those shapes. It is Tesseract's LSTM recogniser, the same engine behind most open-source OCR, compiled to WebAssembly and run in this tab.
    It does not read — it guesses well
    There is no understanding here, only shape-matching against a model of what English text looks like. That is why the confidence figure matters and why it is shown per word rather than as one reassuring average. A wrong digit in an account number reads perfectly and is the error that costs the most.
    What it needs from you
    A picture where the text is upright, in focus and reasonably large. A screenshot is close to ideal. A flat scan is nearly as good. A photograph taken at an angle, in poor light, or of a page that is curved will produce noticeably worse results, and the confidence figures will say so.
    What it cannot do
    Handwriting, at all — that is a different problem needing a different model. Languages other than English, in this version: the recogniser ships with English only, because each additional language is another two megabytes downloaded by everybody. Layout is not preserved either; you get the text in reading order, not the columns and boxes it sat in.
    What it costs to load
    About five megabytes the first time — the recogniser and its English model — downloaded only when you open this tool and cached by your browser afterwards. Nothing else on this site is anywhere near that heavy, which is exactly why it is not loaded until you ask for it.

    About this tool

    How accurate is it?

    On a clean screenshot or a flat scan of printed text, high enough to paste and skim. On a photograph taken at an angle or in poor light, low enough that you should read it against the picture before using it. Rather than ask you to guess which you have, the tool reports its confidence for every word and marks the doubtful ones, so the checking has somewhere to start.

    Can it read handwriting?

    No. Recognising handwriting is a genuinely different problem — the shapes vary per person rather than per font — and needs a model trained for it. This engine is trained on printed type and will produce confident-looking nonsense from handwriting rather than an error, which is the reason to say so plainly here.

    Which languages does it handle?

    English only, in this version. The language model is about two megabytes on its own, and shipping several so that most visitors download models they will never use is the trade this site keeps refusing. Other languages are on the list for the image tools and will arrive as a choice you make rather than a cost everybody pays.

    Why is it slow, and why the download?

    Because a real OCR engine and its language model are being fetched and then run in your browser, rather than a photograph being sent to a machine in a data centre that does the work. That is the trade this whole site makes: about five megabytes once, some seconds per image, and your document stays on your device.

    Can it read the text in a scanned PDF?

    Yes, and it has its own tool now: OCR a PDF draws every page and recognises it in one step, so you no longer have to export the pages as images and bring them here. Use that one for a document; this one is for a picture you already have.

    Is my picture uploaded?

    No. The engine, the language model and the recognition all live in this tab. This is the tool where that matters most on the whole site: the pictures people run OCR on are receipts, letters, prescriptions, payslips and passport pages, and every free online OCR service receives all of them.

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