How to extract text from an image with OCR

OCR (optical character recognition) reads the letters in a picture and gives you text you can copy. Results depend a lot on the picture, so a few habits help.

By 孤獨的時空旅人 · Updated 2026-10-16

How it works

OCR finds lines of text in the picture and compares each character with trained language data. The Image to Text tool runs the Tesseract engine in your browser; the language data is loaded from this site, and your image is never uploaded. The first use of a language downloads a few MB.

Get a clean picture

Use a sharp, well-lit, straight-on image of printed text. Crop away borders and unrelated objects, avoid glare and shadows, and make sure the text is not tiny: a photo where letters are at least about 20 pixels tall reads far better than a small thumbnail. Screenshots are usually better than phone photos of a screen.

Choose the right language

Pick the language that matches the text. Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean options also read English letters and digits, so mixed text works. Choosing the wrong language is the most common reason for strange output.

Check the result

OCR is approximate. Proofread names, numbers and punctuation, and compare with the picture. Handwriting, curved or very small text, tables, columns and busy backgrounds are often wrong. If a scanned PDF needs OCR, take a screenshot of each page and run it through the tool.

Privacy

Because the recognition runs in your browser, documents such as receipts, IDs and contracts are not sent to any server. Still, treat the extracted text with care and delete files you no longer need.

Tools used in this guide

Image to Text (OCR)Extract text from an image Photo Filter & Color AdjustFilters, brightness, contrast, warmth Compress ImageShrink JPG, PNG and WebP files Resize ImageChange width and height

Frequently asked questions

Which languages can it read?

Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai and English.

Why is the text wrong?

Blur, glare, skew, handwriting and tiny text lower accuracy. Use a sharp picture and choose the right language.

Can it read a PDF?

Not directly. Take a screenshot of the page, or export it as an image.

Is my image uploaded?

No. Only the language data is downloaded from this site.

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