A phone photo of a form, a screenshot of an error, a scanned contract — the text is right there, and yet you're about to retype it. OCR (optical character recognition) reads it out in seconds, and the version here runs entirely on your device, which matters because documents worth OCR-ing are usually documents worth keeping private.
Images and screenshots
- Open Image to Text and drop the photos — several at once is fine.
- Pick the language of the text (the model downloads once, then works offline).
- Each image is read with a confidence score; copy per image, or download everything as one .txt.
Runs on-device — IDs and documents never touch a server.
Scanned PDFs
Drop the file into PDF to Text. A PDF made from Word or a website extracts instantly (it carries real text); a scanner's PDF is photographs of pages, and the tool detects that and offers Run OCR — each page renders at 300 DPI and is read in sequence. A 20-page scan takes a couple of minutes and never leaves your machine.
Getting the best read
OCR loves flat, sharp, well-lit printed text. Photograph the page straight-on and fill the frame; screenshots read near-perfectly as-is. Watch the confidence score — below ~80% usually means a blurry or angled shot, and re-shooting beats hand-correcting. For text living in a Word file there's no OCR needed at all: the Word converter extracts it directly, and EPUB to Text does the same for ebooks.