UtilityBaseImage Tools
Image to Text (OCR)
Extract text from photos, screenshots, and scans — OCR that runs on your device.
Updated July 8, 2026
How to use the image to text (ocr)
- 1Pick the language of the text in your image.
- 2Drop in a screenshot, photo, or scan.
- 3First run downloads the engine — it's cached afterwards.
- 4Copy the extracted text, and proofread numbers and names.
Common uses
- Copying text out of a screenshot that won't let you select it
- Digitizing a printed letter, receipt, or form
- Extracting a quote or reference from a photographed book page
- Pulling text from an image to translate or search it
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from other free OCR sites?
Nearly all of them upload your image to their servers for processing — check their privacy pages. Here the OCR engine (Tesseract, compiled to WebAssembly) downloads to your browser once and runs on your machine. Slightly slower on huge scans, but your documents stay yours; you can watch the network tab and see nothing leave.
How do I get the best accuracy?
Feed it what OCR loves: high contrast, even lighting, text roughly horizontal, and the text filling most of the frame. Screenshots are nearly perfect by nature. For phone photos of paper, shoot straight-on (perspective distortion hurts), avoid shadows across the page, and crop to the text before uploading. And pick the right language — it matters more than people expect.
Does it read handwriting?
Mostly no, and it's better to say so upfront: Tesseract is built for printed text. Very neat block capitals sometimes work; cursive produces fragments. Handwriting recognition needs different model architectures than what runs efficiently in a browser today — for printed text, though, expect near-perfect results on clean sources.
What does the confidence score mean?
It's the engine's own estimate of how sure it is, averaged over the page — treat under ~85% as a signal to proofread carefully. Even at high confidence, verify numbers, names, and anything with consequences: OCR classically confuses 0/O, 1/l/I, and 5/S, and those errors are invisible unless you look.
About this tool
The image to text tool runs Tesseract — the most widely used open-source OCR engine — compiled to WebAssembly in your own browser. Drop a screenshot, photo, or scan and get editable, copyable text with a confidence score, in six languages. The engine itself downloads on first use (a few megabytes, then cached); your images never do the reverse trip, which matters because the things people OCR — receipts, IDs, contracts, medical letters — are exactly what shouldn't sit on a stranger's server. Excellent on printed text and screenshots; honest about its limits on handwriting.
Like most tools on UtilityBase, the image to text (ocr) runs entirely in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded or stored on a server. It's free to use with no account required. Browse more image tools here.
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