Take a screenshot (Win+Shift+S on Windows, Cmd+Shift+4 on a Mac), click this page and press Ctrl+V. The text appears in a box you can edit and copy. Paste more screenshots and they queue up.
Screenshots are the easiest images to read: the text is sharp and straight. On our clean screenshots English came out at 100.0% of characters right, and dark-mode screenshots at 100.0%.
Nothing is uploaded. The image is read by a model that runs inside your browser, so it works for private documents and keeps working on a slow connection once the model is cached.
Small text in screenshots
Phone screenshots often have small text. The tool enlarges small images before reading, which helps a lot; on our small-text test images English came out at 100.0%. If a line is wrong, zoom in before taking the screenshot.
How to do it
- Take a screenshot of what you need.
- Click this page and press Ctrl+V (or drop the file).
- Copy the text, or download it as .txt or Word.
How accurate it is (measured, not claimed)
We render known text in each script as images in five styles: a clean screenshot, small 15 px text, a photo (rotated, soft focus, uneven light, JPEG), a dark-mode screenshot and a rough photo (low contrast, blurrier, more tilt, heavy JPEG). Each engine reads them in a browser, and we count the characters it gets right (100% minus the character error rate). The default engine for each script is the one with fewer character errors (within half a point, the one with more whole words right).
| Script | Engine | All | clean | small | photo | dark | rough | s / image |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | PaddleOCR PP-OCRv5default | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 2.3 |
| English | Tesseract 5 | 99.6% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 99.6% | 100.0% | 98.4% | 0.7 |
| Other Latin languages | PaddleOCR PP-OCRv5default | 99.9% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 99.5% | 1.7 |
| Hindi | Tesseract 5default | 99.7% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 98.2% | 0.5 |
| Hindi | PaddleOCR PP-OCRv5 | 96.7% | 99.4% | 96.7% | 98.5% | 94.0% | 94.7% | 1.8 |
| Urdu (Nastaliq) | Tesseract 5default | 70.7% | 77.1% | 76.7% | 68.2% | 69.1% | 62.9% | 0.2 |
| Urdu (Nastaliq) | PaddleOCR PP-OCRv5 | 30.7% | 44.7% | 32.3% | 25.6% | 44.2% | 7.7% | 0.9 |
| Urdu (Naskh) | Tesseract 5default | 95.7% | 97.1% | 97.0% | 97.4% | 96.4% | 90.6% | 0.4 |
| Urdu (Naskh) | PaddleOCR PP-OCRv5 | 81.8% | 90.0% | 82.0% | 84.6% | 86.7% | 65.3% | 1.8 |
| Arabic | PaddleOCR PP-OCRv5default | 95.7% | 96.9% | 94.2% | 96.9% | 98.7% | 91.9% | 0.9 |
| Arabic | Tesseract 5 | 95.7% | 96.9% | 96.5% | 96.3% | 96.0% | 92.5% | 0.3 |
| Bengali | Tesseract 5default | 99.1% | 99.4% | 99.3% | 100.0% | 99.3% | 97.6% | 0.3 |
| Tamil | Tesseract 5default | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 0.3 |
| Tamil | PaddleOCR PP-OCRv5 | 98.5% | 99.5% | 99.0% | 99.5% | 98.1% | 96.4% | 2.3 |
| Telugu | PaddleOCR PP-OCRv5default | 98.5% | 99.0% | 99.5% | 99.0% | 100.0% | 95.0% | 1.2 |
| Telugu | Tesseract 5 | 83.5% | 100.0% | 61.6% | 100.0% | 81.0% | 73.9% | 1.1 |
| Gujarati | Tesseract 5default | 98.9% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 94.7% | 1.2 |
| Punjabi | Tesseract 5default | 99.3% | 99.4% | 100.0% | 99.4% | 100.0% | 97.8% | 0.5 |
| Kannada | Tesseract 5default | 88.5% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 99.5% | 81.9% | 61.5% | 0.4 |
| Malayalam | Tesseract 5default | 96.3% | 95.1% | 99.0% | 95.1% | 99.0% | 93.7% | 0.3 |
Measured 2026-11-03 on Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-14700KF (28 threads), headless Chromium, no WebGPU adapter, cross-origin isolated. Real photos have not been validated for this tool. Generated images are easier than real photos of real paper, so treat these as a ceiling for printed text, not a promise. Tesseract was partly trained on font-rendered text, which may flatter it on generated images. The test text and the script that draws the images are in the project repository.
Private by design
The image is read by an open-source model that runs in your browser (PaddleOCR or Tesseract, both Apache-2.0). It downloads once, about 12 MB for most scripts, and is cached for next time. Your images, the text and your downloads stay on your device: there is no upload, no account and no log of what you read.
Questions people ask
Are my images uploaded to a server?
No. The reading model is downloaded to your browser once and runs on your own phone or computer. The image, the text and the files you download never leave your device. You can switch off your internet after the model has loaded and it still works.
Is it free? Is there a limit?
It is free, with no sign-up, no watermark and no daily cap. Because your own device does the work, there is no server cost for us to recover. Add as many images as you like; they are read one after another.
Which file types can I use?
PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF and BMP images, screenshots pasted with Ctrl+V, and photos from your camera. For a PDF, take a screenshot of the page or export it as an image first.
Does it work with dark mode screenshots?
Yes. Light text on a dark background is read the same way; we test dark-mode screenshots in every script.
Can I paste on my phone?
Most phone browsers do not let pages read pasted images. Use Choose images and pick the screenshot from your gallery instead.