How to Extract Text From an Image or Screenshot (English and Hindi)
The Wi-Fi password is on a sticker photo. A recipe is on a screenshot from someone's story. A friend sent a photo of a printed notice in Hindi and you want to forward the text. In each case you want words, not a picture. Image to text reads the text out of an image so you can copy, edit or download it.
Steps
- Open, drop or paste one or more images, or take a photo.
- Pick a language: English, Hindi, or both.
- Press Read text.
- Copy the result, edit it in the box, or download it.
When you add several images, they're read in order and joined, so photographing a few pages gives you one continuous block of text.
What's doing the reading
It's Tesseract, a well-established open-source OCR engine, running inside your browser with English and Hindi language data. The first run downloads the engine and language files; after that, the browser has them.
For screenshots and receipts, there's a Sharpen small or faint text option. It enlarges and cleans up the image before reading, which helps a lot with thin fonts and low-resolution screenshots. Leave it on unless the text is already large and crisp.
Getting accurate results
OCR is very good with good input and frustrating with bad input. The photo matters more than any setting:
- Fill the frame with the text. A tiny paragraph in the middle of a big photo reads badly.
- Shoot straight on. Steep angles distort letter shapes.
- Even light, no shadows. Shadow across a line often deletes it.
- Hold still. A slightly blurred photo looks fine to you and terrible to an OCR engine.
- Avoid fancy fonts. Script, outlined and heavily stylised text cause the most errors.
Hindi and mixed text
Choose Hindi for Devanagari, or English and Hindi for mixed text like a government notice or a shop bill. Printed Hindi reads well. Proofread conjuncts and matras, since a misread vowel sign changes the word.
Handwriting
Neat, print-style handwriting sometimes works. Joined-up handwriting is hard for OCR engines in general, so expect to correct a lot or retype.
Everyday examples
- Receipts for expense claims: read the total and vendor, paste into your spreadsheet.
- Slides photographed in a lecture: turn them into notes you can search.
- Business cards: copy phone and email instead of typing them.
- Screenshots of error messages: paste the exact message into a search engine.
- Book quotes: photograph a page, copy the passage.
Images vs PDFs
This page reads image files: JPG, PNG, WebP and screenshots. For scanned PDFs, use OCR PDF, which also makes the PDF itself searchable. If you're starting from paper and want a clean document, Scan to PDF followed by OCR PDF gives you both a tidy scan and text.
Always proofread the numbers
OCR mistakes cluster in exactly the places that matter: phone numbers, amounts, dates and codes. A 5 read as an S, a 0 as an O, or a decimal point dropped can turn ₹1,250.50 into ₹125050. Before pasting extracted figures into anything important, glance back at the image and check each one. It takes seconds and avoids awkward corrections later.
Privacy
The tool page says your images are read inside the page. The engine and language data are fetched once on first use. Google ads appear on the page, as across the site.
FAQ
Can it read Hindi? Yes, alone or mixed with English.
Why are some words wrong? Blur, shadows, small text and fancy fonts. Retake the photo in good light and keep Sharpen on.
Can it read handwriting? Neat print sometimes; cursive rarely.
Can I use it on a PDF? Use OCR PDF for PDF files.
Need the words out of a picture? Try Image to text.
— Alok Kumar Singh