Image OCR

How to use Image OCR

1. Open Image OCR — no sign-up or software download is required.
2. Drag and drop your file(s) into the tool, or click to browse and select them from your device.
3. Choose any options you need, such as order, quality, page range or output format.
4. Click the action button and let the tool process everything locally in your browser.
5. Download the finished file. Your originals are never changed or uploaded.

Why use Image OCR?

• 100% free with no limits, no sign-up and no watermarks.
• Private by design — your files are processed in your browser and never uploaded to a server.
• Fast and lightweight, with instant results even on a phone or a slow connection.
• Works everywhere — any modern browser on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android or iOS.
• Part of a full pdf tools suite, so related image ocr tasks are one click away.

What people use Image OCR for

• Extracting text from a photograph of a whiteboard, a receipt or a page of a book.
• Copying text out of a screenshot when the original is no longer available.
• Pulling figures out of a photographed invoice without retyping them.
• Reading text from an image where selecting it is impossible — a diagram, a poster, a slide.

Image OCR: limits and things worth knowing

• Recognition accuracy depends heavily on the source. A 300 DPI flatbed scan of printed text is close to perfect; a phone photo taken at an angle in poor light is not. Straighten and crop before running it.
• This engine is trained on printed type. For handwritten notes use Handwriting OCR instead, which is tuned for it — though handwriting recognition is inherently far less reliable than print.
• Columns, tables and forms lose their layout. You get the text, not the structure, so a multi-column page comes back interleaved.
• Several languages are available and each is downloaded once then cached — see the network note above, which is one of only three genuine exceptions to this site's no-network rule.

Sources

• Tesseract OCR documentation

Is it private and secure?

Your privacy is built in. Image OCR does all processing on your own device using client-side code, so your files are never transmitted, stored or seen by anyone — including us.

Network activity: one download, nothing sent. Your image is never uploaded — the text recognition runs in your browser through WebAssembly. The first time you use a given language, the browser downloads that language's trained data from tessdata.projectnaptha.com. Data comes in; none goes out. After that first download the language is cached and the tool works offline.

You do not have to take that on trust — our privacy proof page publishes the Content-Security-Policy that enforces it, lists every third party it permits, and shows how to verify the whole claim yourself.

We also measured the competition. Our PDF upload audit recorded how many bytes each of 20 online PDF tools actually transmits: 12 of the 13 measurable services uploaded the whole test file, and Filevane transmitted 0.00 MB.

Learn more

OCR: Turn Scanned PDFs and Images into Editable Text — What OCR is, when to use it, and how to extract text from scans, photos and image-only PDFs — privately, in your browser.