Why I Built This Image-to-Text Tool
Have you ever received a screenshot of a document and had to manually type it all out? I built this Image-to-Text (OCR) tool specifically to avoid that exact headache. It reads the text inside your images, screenshots, or scanned photos, and turns it into digital words you can copy and paste.
The coolest part? Unlike other online tools that make you upload your private files to their server, this runs entirely locally in your web browser. That means you can extract text from sensitive business contracts, medical bills, or personal receipts without any of that data ever leaving your computer.
Languages Tested & Supported
The OCR engine is Tesseract.js, a WebAssembly build of Tesseract that ships trained data for over 100 languages. Accuracy is not uniform across them — it tracks how much training data exists for a script and how distinct its glyphs are.
Latin — highest
English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish. Printed text is near-perfect at adequate resolution.
CJK — strong
Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese. Needs more pixels per character than Latin, because the glyphs carry more strokes.
Cyrillic — strong
Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian. Watch for confusion between visually identical Latin and Cyrillic letters.
Others — workable
Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Greek, Hindi. Usable on clean printed text; expect to proofread the output.
Choosing the right language before extracting matters most for accented scripts: Vietnamese, German and Polish diacritics get dropped if the engine is expecting plain English.
The Best Things About It
Actual Privacy
I don't store your images. The extraction script (Tesseract.js) downloads to your browser and does all the work directly on your own machine. If your internet cuts out halfway through, it will still finish reading the image.
No Hidden Paywalls
No "login to scan", no 5-image limits. It’s a free utility tool supported by basic ads—use it 50 times a day if you want.
💡 How to Get Perfect Text Scans
Upload Crisp Images
Blurry photos are hard for humans to read, and even harder for OCR. Make sure your screenshot or photo is sharp.
Flatten It Out
If you're taking a photo of a book, try to flatten the page. Distorted, curvy text lines can scramble the output.
Check the Lighting
Avoid huge shadows hanging over half the document. Even lighting makes the black-and-white contrast pop for the reader.
Watch the Background
Text over busy backgrounds (like a meme format or a nature photo) can confuse the scanner. Solid colors are best.
How People Keep Using This
Digitizing Homework
Snap a photo of a handout and copy the text straight into your Word doc instead of typing everything from scratch.
Video Transcripts
Screenshotting slides from a YouTube lecture and scraping the text for study notes.
Translation Help
Grabbing Chinese or Japanese text from an image, so you can paste it directly into Google Translate.
Code Snippets
When someone posts an image of code on Twitter or Discord and you just want to copy the syntax without manually typing.
How this compares
| Feature | Txt2Img.click | OnlineOCR.net | i2OCR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where processing happens | In your browser (Tesseract.js / WebAssembly) | Uploaded to their server | Uploaded to their server |
| Files per hour | No limit | 5 (free guest) | 1 image or PDF page at a time |
| PDF input | No — screenshot the page first | Yes | Yes, image-based PDFs |
| Output formats | Plain text | TXT, DOCX, XLSX, RTF, PDF | Plain text, Word, HTML, searchable PDF |
| Works offline after load | Yes | No | No |
Figures checked against each tool's own published pages on . Free tiers change without notice — if a number here disagrees with the vendor's page, the vendor is right. Competitor links are nofollow.
Full nine-row table, and the cases where the other two are the better choice, in the free OCR comparison. Head-to-head: vs OnlineOCR.net · vs i2OCR.
Common Questions
Why did my text come out weird?
Usually the image resolution is too low, or the font is overly scripted. On clean, sharp text the engine is essentially perfect once capital letters are 9 to 14 pixels tall, and only collapses below about 6 — I measured this across three typefaces and eleven sizes. Real photos need more than that, because noise, blur and skew all cost you, so the practical advice is still to zoom in and take a closer screenshot.
Does this work with handwritten notes?
It struggles strongly with messy handwriting. It handles printed text flawlessly, but cursive or fast scribbles will just generate gibberish.
What file formats can I upload?
Any standard web image: JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF. If you have a PDF, just take a screenshot of the page first.
Which languages does the OCR support?
The engine is Tesseract.js, which supports over 100 languages. Accuracy is highest for Latin-script printed text such as English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch; strong for CJK scripts including Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, and for Cyrillic such as Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian; and workable for Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Greek and Hindi. Selecting the right language first matters most for accented scripts — Vietnamese, German and Polish diacritics get dropped if the engine expects plain English.
Are my images uploaded anywhere?
No. Tesseract.js runs as WebAssembly inside your browser, so the image file never leaves your device. You can confirm it by opening DevTools, switching to the Network tab, and running an extraction — no request carries your image.