How to Extract Text From a Screenshot (Free OCR, In Your Browser)

Step by step

1. Open the Image to Text toolGo to the Image to Text (OCR) tool. It runs the recognition engine in your browser, so the image you feed it is never uploaded to a server.
2. Add your screenshot or photoDrop in the screenshot or image that contains the text — a PNG or JPG works well. Screenshots are ideal input because they are usually sharp and high-contrast.
3. Run the recognitionThe tool scans the image and pulls out the text it can read. Cleaner, higher-contrast images with straight, clearly-sized text produce the most accurate result.
4. Copy or download the textReview the extracted text, then copy it to your clipboard or save it. You can now paste it into a search box, a document, an email, or wherever you needed it.

What OCR is doing under the hood

To a computer, a screenshot is just coloured pixels — it has no idea that a particular cluster of dark shapes spells a word. Optical character recognition is the technique that looks at those shapes, recognises them as letters and digits, and reassembles them into text you can select, search, and edit. It is the same idea a scanner app uses to make a paper document searchable.

Because it is reading shapes rather than retrieving stored characters, the quality of the picture matters: the clearer and more regular the lettering, the more confidently the engine reads it.

Why screenshots are especially good OCR input

Photos of paper can be blurry, angled, or unevenly lit, which makes recognition harder. A screenshot, by contrast, is captured directly from a screen — the text is crisp, evenly lit, high-contrast, and perfectly flat. That is close to ideal for OCR, which is why pulling text out of a screenshot of an error message, a chat, an invoice, or a slide tends to be very reliable.

Getting the most accurate result

A few habits noticeably improve accuracy. Crop to just the text you care about so the engine is not distracted by icons and decoration. Use the largest, sharpest version of the image you have rather than a tiny thumbnail. Favour clear, reasonably-sized text over tiny or highly stylised fonts. And if a screenshot is very small, capturing it again at a higher resolution usually helps more than anything else.

The tool currently reads English text most reliably; very decorative fonts, handwriting, and heavily overlapping text remain the hardest cases for any OCR engine, so a cleaner capture beats a fancy one.

Your image never leaves your device

Screenshots often contain private information — an account page, a message thread, an invoice, an internal document. Because the recognition runs in your browser, the image is read on your own machine and never uploaded, so you can extract text from a sensitive screenshot without sending it to anyone.