You’ve got a screenshot, a photo of a document, or a slide full of text you need to edit — and retyping it is the last thing you want to do. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the text out of the image for you, so you can copy, edit and reuse it in seconds. This guide explains how it works and how to get the most accurate result.
TL;DR — Drop an image into the image-to-text tool; it reads the text and lets you copy it or save a .txt file. Runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
What OCR is good for
- Screenshots — pull a quote, code snippet or error message out of a screen grab.
- Documents and receipts — turn a photo of a page into editable text.
- Slides and whiteboards — capture notes without retyping.
- Printed pages — digitise a paragraph from a book or report.
What makes OCR accurate
OCR quality depends almost entirely on the input image. Give it clean text and it’s near-perfect; give it a blurry, skewed photo and it struggles.
| Improves accuracy | Reduces accuracy |
|---|---|
| High resolution, in focus | Blurry or low-res |
| Straight, level text | Skewed or rotated |
| High contrast (dark text, light background) | Low contrast, busy background |
| Plain printed fonts | Decorative fonts, handwriting |
Tip: Crop the image down to just the text block before running OCR. Removing borders, logos and background gives the reader less to get confused by and noticeably improves the result.
Step by step: extract text from an image
- Open the image-to-text tool and drop in your screenshot or photo.
- Let it read the text automatically.
- Review the output for any obvious slips (numbers and symbols are the usual culprits).
- Copy the text to your clipboard, or download it as a .txt file.
Because it runs on your device, sensitive documents stay private — nothing is uploaded.
Cleaning up the result
OCR is fast but not flawless. After extracting:
- Skim for 0/O and 1/l/I mix-ups, the most common OCR errors.
- Check line breaks — long paragraphs sometimes split oddly.
- For tables and columns, expect to do a little manual tidying.
For the cleanest input, photograph or screenshot text straight on with good lighting, then crop tight.
Where to go next
- Crop an image — isolate the text before reading it.
- Compress images without losing quality — optimise the source photo.
- Convert images to PDF — bundle scanned pages into one document.