Read the text out of a photo or scan
Pull the words out of a scanned document, a screenshot or a photo of a page, so you can copy, search and edit them.
A photo of a page, a screenshot, or a scan
Works on scans and photos where the text is part of the picture and cannot be selected.
Built for one job
Each tool does a single thing properly, with the settings that job actually needs.
Finishes in seconds
No queue and no waiting around — most jobs are done before you look away.
Free and unlimited
No sign-up, no credits, no watermark on anything you download.
How to read the text out of a photo or scan
- 1
Add a photo or scan
A photo of a page, a screenshot, or a scanned PDF.
- 2
Pick the language
It decides between characters that look alike, so it matters.
- 3
Copy or save the text
Straight to the clipboard, or as a .txt file.
Frequently asked questions
Nothing was found in my file. Why?
Usually one of three things. Handwriting is not supported — recognition is trained on printed type. A photo taken at an angle or in uneven light is much harder than a straight, evenly lit one. And a PDF that already has selectable text does not need this tool at all: copy it directly, or use PDF to JPG if you want the pages as images.
How accurate is it?
On a clean scan of printed text, very. On a phone photo of a curled receipt, much less. It is a best guess rather than a transcription, so check names, numbers and anything that matters before relying on it — a misread digit in an invoice total looks exactly as confident as a correct one.
Why does the language setting matter so much?
Recognition uses the language to choose between characters that look nearly identical in print, and to weigh which words are plausible. Reading Spanish text with English selected produces noticeably worse results than picking Spanish.
Why do I get plain text instead of a searchable PDF?
Because text is what people actually want when they cannot select anything in a scan, and it is honest about what recognition produces. A searchable PDF hides the guesses behind the original image, which makes mistakes harder to spot rather than easier.
What are the limits?
Thirty megabytes, and the first twenty pages of a PDF. Each page is recognised separately, so a long document is a long job, and it runs one at a time on a shared machine.
Common tasks
These open the same tool, already set up for a specific job.