Convert a screenshot or photo to text online for free. Upload your image, let the tool scan the text, and copy or download the result
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Accepted: .png,.jpg,.jpeg
Retyping text out of a screenshot, a quote, a code snippet, a phone number from a photo, is slow and easy to get wrong. Screenshot to Text on File Tools Online reads the text in your screenshot and gives it back to you as real, editable text. Upload your screenshot, let the tool scan it, and get text you can copy, paste, and edit right away. Whether the image came from your phone's screenshot button, a downloaded picture, or a photo you took of a page or sign, the process is the same: upload the image, let the tool read the characters in it, and get back plain text instead of a picture of text.
Open Screenshot to Text and choose the image with the text you need.
The tool reads the text in your screenshot automatically.
Get the extracted text, ready to copy, paste, or download.
Your original screenshot is not changed by the process, the extracted text is delivered as a separate result.
Pull text out of a screenshot automatically instead of typing it by hand.
Get usable text back in moments, no manual transcription required.
The tool runs in your browser, no desktop software or plugin required.
Extract text from a screenshot on a laptop, desktop, or phone, using nothing more than a web browser.
Your file is processed over HTTPS and automatically deleted from our servers within 30 minutes.
There is no cost to convert a screenshot to text or download the result.
This tool works using optical character recognition, commonly called OCR, technology that reads the shapes of letters in an image and converts them into actual text characters. Tesseract is the OCR engine confirmed elsewhere on this site for a similar tool, so it is a reasonable, though not fully confirmed, expectation that this tool uses the same underlying technology.
Accuracy depends heavily on the image itself. A clean, high-contrast screenshot with a standard font will generally come back nearly perfect. A blurry photo, a low-resolution screenshot, unusual or stylized fonts, or text set against a busy background will produce more errors. It is always worth reading through the extracted text and comparing it against the original before relying on it for anything important.
Text color and background also play a role. Dark text on a plain light background, or light text on a plain dark background, is the easiest case for OCR to read correctly. Text overlaid on a photo, a gradient, or a busy pattern behind it is harder to separate from the background and is more likely to produce dropped or misread characters. Straight, horizontal text reads more reliably than text set at an angle or wrapped around a curve.
File Tools Online has a separate tool, PDF OCR, that also uses optical character recognition, but the two tools do different jobs. PDF OCR adds a hidden, searchable text layer behind a scanned PDF page so the file becomes searchable, the visible page still looks like a scan and the text layer is not meant to be edited directly. Screenshot to Text works differently, it gives you the extracted text itself, as plain text you can copy, paste, and edit right away. If you have a scanned PDF document, use PDF OCR. If you have a screenshot or photo and want the text out of it directly, this is the right tool.
Pulling text out of a screenshot comes up constantly in everyday work and browsing, often in moments where retyping by hand simply is not practical.
Standard OCR technology like the kind this tool most likely uses is built and trained mainly for printed or typed text, not handwriting. Handwritten notes, especially cursive or messy handwriting, are a fundamentally different recognition problem and standard OCR often performs poorly on them. If your source material is handwritten rather than typed or printed, File Tools Online has a separate Handwriting Recognition tool built specifically for that case, and it is worth trying that instead.
Whether this tool preserves the original layout, line breaks, columns, or spacing, or returns the text as one continuous block, is not something we can confirm without testing it directly. Screenshots with a simple, single-column layout are the most likely to come back cleanly formatted, screenshots with multiple columns, tables, or unusual layouts are more likely to need some manual cleanup afterward. If you are pulling text from a screenshot of a table or a multi-column article, expect to spend a little time rearranging the result, since most OCR tools read left to right across the whole image rather than understanding that separate columns should stay separate.
Extracting text from an image traditionally meant using dedicated OCR software or a scanning app. Screenshot to Text on File Tools Online skips that entirely. There is nothing to download and nothing to install, whether you are on Windows, Mac, Android, or iPhone, you upload your screenshot directly in your browser and get your text back. That also means no software updates to keep current, no license to manage, and no worrying about whether an app you installed once still works after your operating system's next update.
Because Screenshot to Text runs entirely in your browser, it works the same way regardless of your device or operating system. Convert a screenshot to text on a Windows PC, a Mac, an Android phone, or an iPhone without installing anything or switching to desktop software.
It reads the text inside a screenshot or image you upload and gives it back to you as real, editable text.
Accuracy depends on the image quality. Clean, high-contrast screenshots with standard fonts extract nearly perfectly, blurry or low-resolution images produce more errors.
Standard OCR generally struggles with handwriting. Use the separate Handwriting Recognition tool for handwritten text instead.
PDF OCR adds a hidden, non-editable searchable text layer behind a scanned PDF page. This tool gives you the extracted text itself as plain, editable text.
This is not confirmed without testing it directly. Simple, single-column screenshots are most likely to extract cleanly.
Yes, the result is delivered as plain text meant to be copied, pasted, and edited.
This is not confirmed without testing it directly.
Common formats such as JPG and PNG are the safe baseline. If your file is a different format, convert it first with the Image Converter.
Yes. Upload your screenshot to Screenshot to Text and get your result, there is no cost to use it.
No. Upload your screenshot and extract the text directly in your browser, no software installation required.
Yes. The tool runs in your browser, so it works the same way on Windows, Mac, Android, and iPhone without installing anything.
Your file is processed over HTTPS and automatically deleted from our servers within 30 minutes.
File Tools Online is a collection of free, browser based tools for working with audio, video, PDF, and image files, built for people who need a quick, reliable result without installing software. Screenshot to Text is one part of a larger set of document and text extraction tools, so once your text is extracted, you can translate it, or use it alongside the other tools in the same toolkit.
Pulling text out of a screenshot used to mean retyping it by hand or hunting down dedicated OCR software just for one quick task. Browser based text extraction makes that same result available in a couple of clicks, for the many everyday moments where you just need the words out of a picture.
Screenshot to Text is built for the small, frequent moments that add up over a week of browsing and working online: a quote worth saving, a snippet of code shown in a tutorial video, a phone number texted as a photo instead of typed. None of those individually justify installing dedicated software, but together they are common enough that having a fast, free, browser based way to handle them is genuinely useful.
As with the other tools in the toolkit, files are handled over HTTPS and removed from our servers automatically within 30 minutes, so there is nothing left behind to manage or clean up after you get your result.