Pull editable text out of a photo of a page, a scanned letter or a screenshot. The OCR engine downloads to your browser the first time (about 10 MB) and then works offline, so confidential documents never leave your device. Supports 20 languages including English, Urdu, Arabic, Hindi and Chinese.
What is Image to Text (OCR)?
Our image to text converter uses optical character recognition (OCR) to read the words in a photo, scan or screenshot and give them back as editable text you can copy or save as a TXT file. You can drop several images at once and each one gets its own result.
It saves you from retyping. A printed letter, a page from a book, a label or a photographed whiteboard becomes text you can paste into an email, a document or a search box. The language menu covers 20 languages, including English, Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese and Persian.
How to convert Image to Text
- Drop images (several at once is fine).
- Choose the language.
- Copy the text or download a TXT file.
How Image to Text (OCR) works
OCR works in stages. First the image is cleaned up: it is converted to black and white so the text stands out from the background. Next the engine finds the layout, separating blocks of text into lines, then lines into words and words into individual character shapes.
Each shape is then matched against a trained model. The engine here is Tesseract, an open-source OCR system whose modern versions use a neural network (an LSTM) that reads a whole line at a time rather than one letter in isolation. Reading in context is why it can tell a capital O from a zero and fix many smudged letters using the words around them.
The language you choose matters because each language has its own model with its own alphabet and common word patterns. Tesseract runs in your browser through WebAssembly. The model (roughly 3–15 MB) downloads once and is cached, and your image is never sent anywhere.
Key features of Image to Text (OCR)
Free OCR, many images
Extract text from a batch of images in one run, with no page credits and no watermark. Add a batch of photos and you get a separate, copyable result for each one, plus a TXT download.
98% on clean print
Clear printed text photographed or scanned at around 300 DPI typically reads at 98% accuracy or better. Accuracy drops with blur, low light, skewed angles and handwriting, so crop and straighten first for the best result.
Fast after the first run
The first time you use a language, its model downloads (a few MB). After that it is cached, and a typical page is recognised in a few seconds on a laptop, slightly longer on older phones.
Phone camera to text
Works in Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox on desktop and mobile. On iPhone or Android, pick a photo from your gallery and copy the recognised text straight into notes, email or chat.
Usable with a screen reader
The language menu, buttons and results are labelled and reachable by keyboard. Recognition progress is announced through a live region, and the extracted text is plain text that screen readers read naturally.
Recognition stays on device
Only the language model is fetched; your image is processed locally via WebAssembly and never sent to our servers. That makes it safe for medical letters, bank documents and anything else you would not hand to a stranger.
What makes EZ Compress's Image to Text (OCR) different
No server sees your images
Most OCR websites send your picture to their servers and return the text. Here the recognition engine itself runs in your browser, so confidential pages stay on your device from start to finish.
Works offline once loaded
After the page and your language model have loaded, you can disconnect from the internet and keep extracting text. That is useful on trains, flights and locked-down office networks where uploads are blocked.
Batch with separate results
Drop several screenshots or photographed pages together. Each image gets its own text box with its own Copy and TXT buttons, so you do not have to untangle one long merged result.
Right-to-left and Asian scripts
The language menu includes Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Bengali and Thai, not just Latin alphabets. Choose the right one and the matching trained model is downloaded and used for that image.
Why use Image to Text (OCR)?
Retyping text from a picture is slow and error-prone. An image to text tool gets you the words in seconds, ready to edit, search or translate. Typical uses include quoting a paragraph from a printed book, pulling an address off a parcel label, saving the text of an old letter, or grabbing figures from a photographed notice.
OCR is also the first step for many other jobs. Once the text is out, you can paste it into a translator, a spreadsheet or a document. If you need a formatted Word file rather than plain text, use JPG to Word, and for screenshots you paste from the clipboard, Copy Text From Image is quicker.
Who can use Image to Text (OCR)?
Students and researchers
Photograph pages from library books or journals you cannot take home and turn them into searchable notes and quotations for essays.
Legal and admin staff
Pull the text out of scanned letters and faxed forms so it can be quoted, searched or pasted into case files without confidential material ever leaving your device.
Archivists and family historians
Transcribe printed documents, newspaper clippings and old typewritten letters into text that can be indexed, searched and shared with relatives.
Journalists
Extract quotes from photographed press releases, court notices and printed statements quickly and accurately, in the language they were written in.
People with low vision
Turn a photo of printed text into plain text that a screen reader or magnifier can present comfortably, without sending the image to a server.