How to extract text from an image or PDF (OCR)

2026-07-01

OCR (optical character recognition) turns a picture of text into text you can actually select, copy and edit — from a screenshot, a photo of a page, or a scanned PDF. Modern OCR runs right in your browser, so your documents stay private.

From an image

Open Image to Text, drop a photo or screenshot, and it recognizes the text on your device and hands you the result to copy. Great for pulling a quote off a slide or digitizing a receipt.

From a PDF

If your PDF is a scan (an image of a page), use PDF OCR to recognize the text. If the PDF already contains real text (it was exported from a document, not scanned), PDF to Text extracts it instantly without OCR.

Getting good results

• Sharp, high-contrast, straight images work best — avoid blur, glare and steep angles.
• Crop to just the text with the Image Cropper before OCR for cleaner output.
• The OCR engine downloads once to your browser and then runs on-device — your images and text are never uploaded.