Extract text from a photo or screenshot
Whether it's a photo of a notice board, a screenshot of a table in a video call, or a picture of a receipt, getting the text out of an image is one of the most common reasons people need OCR.
The quickest way: paste a screenshot
- Copy a screenshot to your clipboard: on Windows press Win + Shift + S; on a Mac press Cmd + Ctrl + Shift + 4.
- Open the converter and press Ctrl + V (or Cmd + V on a Mac).
- The text appears a few seconds later, ready to copy.
You can also drop image files onto the converter: JPG, PNG, WebP, BMP, GIF and TIFF all work. Pick the right language in the OCR box first if the text isn't English.
Photos from your phone
iPhones save photos as HEIC by default, which browsers can't always open. Either change the camera setting to "Most Compatible" (Settings → Camera → Formats), or share the photo as a JPG.
For the best results, see the photo tips in 10 ways to get more accurate OCR: shoot straight down, in even light, and fill the frame with the page.
What works well
- Screenshots of documents, web pages, slides and spreadsheets
- Photos of printed pages, notices, menus and signs
- Receipts and invoices, if they're sharp and flat
What's harder
- Handwriting: results are usually poor
- Text on busy backgrounds, such as photos and patterned paper
- Very small text in a wide photo; crop or zoom in before taking the picture
- Curved surfaces like bottle labels
Tables in screenshots
OCR reads tables as lines of text, keeping the values in order. To get a proper table back, paste the text into ChatGPT or Claude and ask: "Rebuild this as a Markdown table with these columns: …". Models do this reliably when the values are in the right order.
Privacy
Images are processed in your browser and never uploaded. That makes it safe to use for screenshots that contain personal or business information. See is it safe to use online converters?