How to Extract Text from an Image (Free OCR, No Sign-up)

Published August 25, 2026

Need to grab text from a screenshot, a scanned document, or a photo of a page? Optical Character Recognition (OCR) reads printed text out of images and gives you clean, copy-pasteable text.

The free way

Use the Image to Text (OCR) tool — it runs Tesseract, the same open-source OCR engine used by Google and Microsoft, right on the server. No sign-up, no daily limit.

Step-by-step

1. Go to the Image to Text tool.

2. Upload your image — JPG, PNG, WebP, and HEIC (iPhone) all work. Drag and drop, browse, or paste with Ctrl+V.

3. Click Process — the tool converts the image to grayscale, enhances contrast, and runs OCR.

4. Read and download — extracted text appears in a preview panel on the page. Download it as a .txt file, or just copy it.

What kind of images work best?

OCR is very accurate on clean printed text:

• Screenshots of documents or code
• Scanned pages (300 DPI or higher)
• Photos of printed pages (good lighting, flat paper)
• Typed forms and certificates

It struggles with:

• Handwriting
• Stylised or decorative fonts
• Low-resolution or blurry images
• Text on complex backgrounds

Tip: if the text is small, crop to just the text area before uploading. Tighter crops give better accuracy.

Is my image private?

Yes — the image is processed in a private temp area and deleted within 30 minutes. It's never viewed by a human or shared.

When to use OCR vs PDF text extraction

If you have a digital PDF (one with a text layer), use the PDF to Text tool instead — it's instant and perfectly accurate because it reads the embedded text directly, not pixels.

If your PDF is a scan (images of pages, no text layer), the PDF to Text tool will tell you, and you should use Image to Text on each page image instead.

Related tools

• PDF to Text — extract text from digital PDFs instantly
• PDF to Word — convert PDF to editable Word document
• HTML to PDF — convert HTML files to PDF
• Compress Image — shrink images before OCR for faster processing