Why copy text from an image?
Sometimes the words you need are stuck inside a photo, not a document. You might have photographed a notice, saved a screenshot of instructions, received a JPG of printed notes or captured a label on a product. You can see the letters, but you cannot normally highlight them and paste them into an email or document.
Optical character recognition, usually shortened to OCR, attempts to turn those visible letter shapes into text characters. It is useful when retyping would take too long, especially if the image contains paragraphs, lists or repeated information. The result is editable plain text, not a recreated photograph.
Step by step: convert a JPG or PNG to text
- Open our free Image to Text converter on your phone, tablet or computer.
- Choose a JPG, PNG, WebP or BMP file from your device. You can select up to five images in one batch, with a maximum of 15 MB each.
- Alternatively, copy a screenshot to the clipboard and use the Paste screenshot button if your browser permits clipboard access.
- Review the image previews and select Extract text from images. The tool recognises printed English text in your browser.
- Read the text separately for each image, copy just the section you need, or download the combined result as a .txt file.
This process does not require you to create an account. Your images are read on your device rather than uploaded to a conversion service. The OCR software itself may need to download the first time you use it, so a network connection is initially helpful.
Getting the best results from a photo
OCR has to infer words from pixels. A clean screenshot of large black type on a white background will often be easier to recognise than a blurry photograph of a wrinkled receipt. Start by ensuring the image is sharp enough for you to read without zooming excessively.
- Straighten the image: keep text horizontal and avoid photographing a page at a steep angle.
- Use good lighting: even light reduces shadows, reflections and faded letters.
- Crop distractions: remove as much irrelevant desk, wall or background as you can.
- Choose readable resolution: tiny, heavily compressed lettering is more easily confused.
- Keep languages in mind: this version is configured for printed English; other scripts may need a specialist tool.
Can you extract words from a screenshot?
Yes. A screenshot is just another image. If it contains clear printed letters, our OCR converter can attempt to recognise them. This can help with notes from slides, a screenshot of a message you are permitted to copy, text inside a graphic or instructions captured from an application. It is still important to check the output because icons, decorative lettering and tightly packed controls can confuse recognition.
What if the text is inside a PDF instead?
Use our PDF to Text converter when the original file is a PDF. It first tries to read selectable text directly, which is often faster and more accurate. For scanned pages with no text layer, switch on the optional PDF OCR setting. See our guide to scanned versus selectable PDFs for the difference.
Limits of image OCR
Handwriting, curved labels, highly stylised fonts, low-resolution receipts and complex tables may give incomplete results. OCR can also confuse O with 0 or I with 1, omit punctuation or change reading order across columns. If you need an exact quotation, invoice total, medicine dosage, reference number or contractual detail, compare every important word and digit with the original image.
Ready to try?
Go to the free image-to-text tool and convert a clear screenshot or photo. If the output is messy, improve the photo first and run OCR again. For documents stored as PDFs, follow our PDF text extraction walkthrough.