Image to text — copy the words from a photo

How it works

Drop a photo, a screenshot or a scanned page, or take a photo with your phone's camera. The text reader looks at the picture and writes out every word it can see, line by line. You can correct anything it got wrong right there, then press Copy text to paste it into WhatsApp, an email or a form, or download it as a plain .txt file. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account and there is no daily limit.

English and Hindi

Tick English, Hindi or both, depending on what is written in the picture. Hindi pages read best with Hindi ticked; a page that mixes both — a government notice, a school circular, a bill — reads best with both ticked. The first time you use it, the text reader downloads once (a few megabytes) and your browser keeps it, so the next picture starts at once, even offline.

Getting a clean read

OCR is only as good as the picture. Hold the phone straight above the page, not at an angle. Use daylight or a bright room and avoid your own shadow on the paper. Get close enough that the text fills the frame. Screenshots read almost perfectly because the letters are already sharp; a crumpled paper in dim light will give mistakes. If the result looks wrong, check that the right language is ticked and try a sharper photo.

What people use it for

Copying a notice from a college or office board without typing it out. Taking the text of an exam advertisement or a job post that was shared as an image on WhatsApp. Getting an address, a phone number or an account number out of a photo. Pulling a paragraph out of a book page for notes. Copying text from a screenshot of an app that does not let you select it.

Always check names and numbers

Even a good OCR can confuse similar characters — 0 and O, 1 and l, or two Hindi letters that look alike. Before you paste a roll number, a bank account number or a name into a form, compare it with the picture once.

Good companions

Have a whole scanned PDF instead of a photo? OCR PDF makes every page searchable and copyable. Want the photo itself as a PDF? Use JPG to PDF. To hide an Aadhaar number on a photo or PDF before sharing it, use Mask Aadhaar.

Privacy

The picture is read on your own device. It is never sent to us or to anyone else — not the photo, and not the words in it.