OCR Online — Extract Text from Images (49 Languages)

OCR in the browser: turning images into text

What OCR is

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the technology that reads text out of images: scanned documents, photos of whiteboards, screenshots, screenshots of PDFs, receipts, book pages. The output is real text you can copy, search, and edit — instead of a picture of words.

How this tool does it

The page runs a compact PP-OCRv6 recognition model compiled to WebAssembly/ONNX, directly in your browser. The model files (a few tens of megabytes) are downloaded once and cached. It handles both printed and reasonably legible handwritten text, in 49 languages — the language is detected from the text itself.

Because it is a small model tuned for speed, it works best on clear images: good lighting, text roughly horizontal, and characters at least ~15 pixels tall.

Tips for the best accuracy

• Crop the image to the text you care about — less noise, better results.
• Use the highest resolution you have; upscaling a blurry photo does not help.
• Straighten rotated scans before running OCR.
• Dark text on a light background works best; inverted or colored text is harder.
• For tables, OCR returns the text in reading order — layout is not preserved.

Common uses

• Digitizing paper documents and receipts
• Copying text out of a PDF that is actually a scan
• Grabbing text from screenshots and memes
• Making photos of notes searchable
• Feeding printed text into a translator

Why local OCR matters more than anywhere

OCR is typically used on the most sensitive documents you own: IDs, bank statements, medical records, contracts. Cloud OCR services read all of it on their servers. This tool runs the model on your device — the image is processed in your browser's memory and nowhere else. For confidential paperwork, that difference is the whole point.