AI Image to Text (OCR)

An image to text converter reads the words in a picture and turns them into editable text. This process is called optical character recognition, or OCR. You upload, drag in, or paste a JPG, PNG, WebP, BMP or GIF, such as a screenshot, a scanned page or a photo of a sign, and the tool returns the text so you can copy it or download it as a .txt file.

It saves retyping. Common jobs are pulling a quote out of a screenshot, copying a table from a scanned letter, grabbing an address from a photo, or making an old printed document searchable. Thirteen languages are supported: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, Korean and Russian.

The engine is Tesseract, the open-source OCR engine with an LSTM neural network, running in your browser through tesseract.js under the Apache-2.0 licence. Each language's trained data, about 2 to 15 MB, downloads once the first time you choose it and is then cached. The image is processed on your device and never uploaded to Toolz or anyone else, which matters for receipts, IDs and private documents. Once the language data is cached it works offline.

Accuracy depends on the image. It works best on clear, printed text that is sharp, straight and well lit. Handwriting, low-resolution photos, heavy shadows, curved pages and decorative fonts give poor results, and complex layouts with columns can come out in the wrong order. Crop to the text and use the highest resolution you have. Always proofread numbers, since a 5 and an S can swap.

It is free with no signup. Alternatives include the OCR built into phone photo apps, desktop scanning software, or cloud OCR services that upload your files. This tool needs no install and keeps the image private. If you need a description of what a picture shows rather than the words in it, use the AI alt text generator instead.