How to Extract Text from Images and PDFs Online (Free OCR)

You've received a scanned contract as a PDF. Or a screenshot of a spreadsheet someone couldn't be bothered to export properly. Or a photo of a whiteboard full of notes from a meeting. The text is right there — visible on screen — but completely untouchable. OCR (optical character recognition) is the technology that bridges this gap, converting images of text into actual, editable characters. And in 2026, you can do it entirely in your browser without uploading a single file.

What Is OCR and How Does It Work?

Optical character recognition is a computer vision technique that analyzes an image and identifies the shapes of letters, numbers, and symbols, converting them into machine-readable text. Early OCR systems from the 1990s were brittle and required clean, printed fonts. Modern OCR engines — like the open-source Tesseract that powers most browser-based tools — use machine learning and can handle a wide variety of fonts, layouts, and even handwriting with reasonable accuracy.

The process works in a few stages: the engine first analyzes the image to detect regions that contain text, then segments those regions into individual characters, then classifies each character against a trained model. The result is a text string that approximates what was in the original image.

When to Use OCR

OCR is the right tool whenever you have text locked inside a raster image — a PNG, JPG, or a scanned PDF where the text layer was never embedded. Common use cases include:

Scanned documents. Contracts, receipts, old tax forms, and archive documents are often scanned as images. OCR makes them searchable and copy-pasteable.

Screenshots with data. Error messages, code snippets shared as images, or screenshots of tables you need to work with — OCR saves significant retyping time.

Photos of physical text. Business cards, whiteboards, menus, signs, labels — anything you've photographed that contains text you need in digital form.

Inaccessible PDFs. Some PDFs are generated from scans and contain only image data, not a text layer. These can't be searched or selected. PDF OCR creates a text layer so you can search, copy, and index the document.

Image OCR vs PDF OCR: What's the Difference?

Both achieve the same goal — extracting text from visual content — but are optimized for different inputs.

Image OCR takes a PNG, JPG, WebP, or similar raster file and returns the extracted text. Use our Image to Text (OCR) tool for photos, screenshots, and individual images.

PDF OCR is designed for multi-page PDF documents where the pages are embedded as images. It processes each page individually and can return text from all pages. Use our PDF OCR tool when working with scanned document files.

Getting the Best OCR Results

OCR accuracy depends heavily on the quality of the input. A few tips to get the best results:

Use high-resolution images. OCR works best at 300 DPI or higher. If you're photographing a document, make sure the image is sharp and in focus. A blurry photo will produce garbage output no matter how good the OCR engine is.

Maximize contrast. Black text on a white background is ideal. If your scan has a gray or yellowed background, increasing contrast before running OCR can significantly improve accuracy. A simple image editor adjustment — or even the exposure slider on your phone — can make a real difference.

Straighten skewed images. Text that runs at an angle is harder for OCR to process correctly. Most phone cameras introduce slight perspective distortion when you photograph a flat document. Cropping and straightening the image beforehand helps considerably.

Use printed text when possible. Handwriting recognition is significantly harder than printed text recognition. For handwritten notes, OCR will give you a rough approximation that still requires manual correction.

Privacy: Why Client-Side OCR Matters

Documents you need to OCR are often sensitive — contracts, tax forms, medical records, financial statements. Most online OCR services upload your files to a remote server for processing. That means your document passes through someone else's infrastructure, gets stored (at least temporarily) on their servers, and is subject to their privacy policy.

Our OCR tools run entirely in your browser using WebAssembly. Your image or PDF is processed locally by your own CPU — no file is ever sent to a server. For sensitive documents, this isn't just a nice feature; it's the only responsible choice.

What to Do with OCR Output

Once you have extracted text, the workflow from there depends on what you need. For spreadsheet data extracted from a screenshot, paste it into a CSV and clean it up. For contract text, paste it into your document editor and format it. For data you want to analyze programmatically, OCR output is a starting point — expect to clean up occasional misread characters, especially around numbers (0 vs O, 1 vs l).

If your original document is a PDF and you want to make it searchable without extracting the text separately, PDF OCR creates a text layer directly inside the document — the output is a new PDF where the text is selectable and indexable, not just a plain text dump.