Paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V (or drop an image) and get the text back in seconds, ready to copy, edit or download. Runs entirely in your browser.
No limits or paywall.
Use instantly, no account.
Processed inside your browser.
Clean, full-quality output.
No upload queue or waiting.
Works on phone and desktop.
Screenshots are the fastest way to capture something on screen, but the text inside them is frozen. You can't select an error message to search it, copy an address from a chat, paste a quote from a video frame or edit a table someone sent you as an image. Retyping is slow and easy to get wrong.
This screenshot to text tool reads the letters for you. Press Ctrl+V to paste a screenshot straight from your clipboard (or drop any image), choose the language, and the text appears ready to copy or download. Recognition runs in your browser, so screenshots of private conversations and documents never leave your device.
Before
Screenshot of an error message, chat or web page
Pixels
You can read it, but you can't select, search or paste the text.
After
Editable plain text
Text
Copy it, paste it into a document or download it as .txt or PDF.
Clean, high-contrast screenshots of typed text give the best results. Accuracy drops on tiny text, stylised fonts, busy backgrounds and handwriting.
On Windows press Win + Shift + S, on Mac Cmd + Shift + 4, or use an existing image file.
Press Ctrl + V (Cmd + V on Mac) anywhere on this page, or drop the image into the workspace above.
Choose the language of the text (English is preselected) and click Extract Text.
Check the result, correct any errors, then copy it to your clipboard or download it as .txt or PDF.
| Factor | Works well | Works poorly | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Text size | Normal UI and body text | Tiny text in a zoomed-out capture | Zoom in before taking the screenshot |
| Contrast | Dark text on light background | Low contrast, text over images | Enable grayscale or threshold |
| Fonts | Standard sans-serif and serif | Decorative or handwritten | Use a clearer source if possible |
| Language | Matches the selected language | Wrong language selected | Pick the language before extracting |
| Layout | Single column of text | Complex tables and mixed columns | Crop to one block of text |
| Image quality | Lossless PNG screenshots | Blurry, heavily compressed photos | Use the original screenshot, not a photo of the screen |
Optical character recognition (OCR) works in stages. The image is first cleaned up and converted to black-and-white, then the engine finds lines of text, splits them into words and characters, and compares the shapes against what it learned for the selected language. A language model then picks the most likely words. This tool uses Tesseract, a widely used open-source OCR engine, running as Tesseract.js inside your browser.
Screenshots are close to ideal input: the text is sharp, straight and evenly lit. That is why OCR on a screenshot is usually far more accurate than OCR on a photo of paper taken at an angle.
The quickest workflow skips files entirely. Capture part of the screen to the clipboard, then paste it here:
Most errors come from the image, not the engine. Capture text at a comfortable reading size rather than zoomed out, and crop to just the block you need so menus, icons and pictures don't confuse the layout analysis. For text over coloured backgrounds or images, the grayscale and threshold options make letters stand out from the background.
Select the correct language before extracting. Tesseract uses different character sets and dictionaries per language; reading Hindi or Arabic with the English model produces nonsense. Always proofread numbers, email addresses and codes, where a single wrong character matters.
Once extracted, the text is ordinary editable text. Correct anything the OCR misread, then copy it to your clipboard with one click or download it as a .txt file or a simple PDF. Line breaks can be preserved to keep the original layout, or merged into flowing paragraphs for easier pasting into documents.
Screenshots often contain personal messages, email addresses, account details and work documents. Here, the image is read and processed in your browser; nothing is sent to a server. The only download is the OCR language data, fetched once the first time you use a language. If you need to share the screenshot itself afterwards, black out sensitive parts with the image redaction tool.
The OCR engine reads twelve languages, each with its own trained model. Picking the right one matters more than any other setting, because the model defines which characters it even looks for.
Copy the exact error text from a screenshot to search for a fix or paste into a support ticket.
Extract addresses, quotes, links and instructions from screenshots of messages.
Pull text from lecture slides, video frames and image-only PDFs into your notes.
Turn screenshots of tables, invoices or emails into editable text instead of retyping.
Paste the screenshot into this page with Ctrl+V (or drop the image file), click Extract Text, and copy the result. The OCR reads the letters in the image and turns them into editable text.
Yes. Copy a screenshot to your clipboard (for example with Win + Shift + S on Windows) and press Ctrl+V anywhere on the page. You don't need to save it as a file first.
No. Text recognition runs in your browser with Tesseract.js. Screenshots of private chats, emails or documents never leave your device. The OCR language data is downloaded once to your browser the first time you use a language.
English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese (Simplified), Hindi, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese and Korean. Select the language before extracting for the best accuracy.
For clean screenshots of typed text at normal size, accuracy is usually very high. Small text, low contrast, unusual fonts and busy backgrounds reduce accuracy, so always proofread important text, especially numbers and codes.
Not reliably. The OCR engine is designed for printed and on-screen text; handwriting usually produces many errors.
PNG, JPG, WebP, BMP and TIFF images, plus anything you paste from the clipboard. PNG screenshots give the best results because they are lossless.
Convert the PDF page to an image first with the PDF to JPG converter, then extract the text here. If the PDF already has selectable text, simply copy it from your PDF reader.
Yes, though screenshots are easier. Photograph the page flat, in even light and in focus, then crop to the text. The full Image to Text tool works the same way.
Yes, by default. Turn off preserve line breaks to merge lines into flowing paragraphs, which is easier to paste into documents.