Best Free AI OCR — Image & PDF to Text
Pull the printed text out of a photo, screenshot or scan — extracted right here, free.
100% free
No signup
No watermark
Files processed in memory, never stored
✨
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How it works
- Add your image or scan. Upload the photo, screenshot or scan whose text you want (up to 12 MB).
- Extract the text. Press Extract text and our GPU reads the printed words out of the image.
- Copy the result. The extracted text appears right here, ready to select and paste wherever you need it.
About this tool
Upload an image — a photo of a page, a screenshot, a scanned document — and this tool reads the printed text out of it and shows it straight back to you here, ready to select and copy. The recognition runs on our own GPU, so there is nothing to install and nothing to route through; the words appear on the page in seconds. One useful thing to know: you do not always need OCR. A PDF that was exported from a word processor or spreadsheet already carries a real text layer, and the PDF to Word and PDF to Excel tools on this site pull that out directly. OCR is for the other case — when the text is locked inside an image rather than stored as actual characters.
What people use it for
- Copy the text out of a screenshot or phone photo
- Turn a scanned page into text you can edit
- Lift a paragraph, quote or address out of a picture
- Get a sign, label or menu into editable text
Frequently asked questions
Use OCR when the words live inside an image — a scan, a photo, a screenshot. If a PDF was exported from a document and already has a selectable text layer, the PDF to Word and PDF to Excel tools here read it directly, with no OCR needed.
All three. A clear, reasonably straight phone photo of a page or sign works, as does a screenshot, alongside conventional scans. The sharper and less skewed the text is, the cleaner the extraction.
It aims to preserve the natural reading order and line breaks of the page. Busy multi-column layouts and tables can come out in a different order than they look, so a quick read-through after extraction is worth doing.
Faint or low-contrast print, heavy skew or curved pages, ornate fonts, and messy handwriting are the usual culprits. Good lighting and a head-on angle do more for accuracy than anything else.
Images go up to 12 MB. The picture is read in memory on our own server and discarded as soon as the text comes back — it is never written to disk or sent to a third party.
Yes — extract text with no account and no watermark. The recognition runs on a shared GPU, so at busy times your job briefly queues; a Pro account skips that wait.
Usually just a few seconds for a typical file — AI OCR — Image & PDF to Text starts working the moment you give it your input.
All modern browsers — Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge. AI OCR — Image & PDF to Text needs nothing installed beyond the browser you already use.