MotionShine01 / Pick
Choose the language
English is set. Pick another if the text is in it; English words mixed in are read too.
Free tool
Image to text: copy text from a picture.
Get the words out of a screenshot, a photo of a page, a slide or a scan, ready to copy or save. Paste a screenshot straight in with Cmd+V or Ctrl+V, or drop many pictures at once. The text reader runs in this tab, so nothing is uploaded. No sign-up, no limit.
This runs in your browser. Your pictures are never uploaded.
How it works
Three steps, nothing to install.
02 / Add
Paste or drop pictures
Take a screenshot and paste it, or drop one or many pictures. The first time, the reader loads, about 7 MB.
03 / Copy
Copy the text
Fix any wrong letter in the box, then copy it or save it as a text file.
Questions
Good to know.
Are my pictures uploaded?
No. The text reader is downloaded to your browser and reads the pictures there, so they never leave your computer. That matters for screenshots of emails, chats or documents.
What reads the text?
Tesseract, the open text recognition engine first made at HP and later developed by Google, in its Tesseract.js version for browsers, under the Apache 2.0 licence. It uses a small neural network trained to read lines of text.
What works best?
Screenshots and clear photos of printed text, straight and well lit. Small pictures are enlarged first, which helps with screenshot text. Handwriting, text on curved or busy backgrounds, and very small photos of text read badly.
Does it keep the layout?
It keeps the lines and paragraphs, not columns, tables or fonts. Text in two columns can come out mixed, so crop each column first with the image cropper.
Can it read PDFs?
Not directly. Take a screenshot of the page and paste it in.
Which languages?
The 16 in the list. Each language downloads once, under 1 MB to 3 MB, the first time you use it.