What image formats does the OCR tool support?

The service accepts common image formats including JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, and WEBP. For best results, use PNG or high-quality JPEG images with clear, high-contrast text. Very low-resolution images or heavily compressed JPEGs may produce poor recognition results. If your source is a PDF, converting individual pages to high-resolution PNG images before processing will yield better accuracy than working from the PDF directly.

How accurate is online OCR?

Accuracy is highest on clearly printed text with good contrast and a clean background — under ideal conditions, accuracy exceeds 95%. Handwriting, decorative fonts, text on complex backgrounds, low-resolution scans, and skewed documents all reduce accuracy significantly. For production-quality OCR of large document volumes, cloud OCR APIs with neural network backends (like Google Cloud Vision or AWS Textract) achieve higher accuracy on difficult inputs.

Which languages does the OCR tool support?

The tool currently supports English, Simplified Chinese (Mandarin as written in mainland China), and Traditional Chinese (as written in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau). These three are the only languages this tool offers; other scripts such as Arabic, Japanese or Korean are not supported.

How do I get better OCR results from my image?

The most impactful improvements come from image quality. Use high-resolution scans at 300 DPI or higher rather than phone camera photos when possible. Ensure high contrast between text and background (dark text on white paper is ideal). Straighten skewed images before processing. Remove shadows and glare from photos of physical documents. If text appears in multiple columns, cropping to individual columns before processing can improve recognition order and accuracy.

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Free

OCR Tool

Extract text from images with an online OCR service — images are uploaded to a third party. Supports English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

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cloudImages are uploaded to a third-party OCR service for recognition — don't use this for contracts, ID documents or other sensitive files

Recognition Language

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Upload File

JPG, PNG, WebP

How to Use

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Upload an image with text

Select an image containing text — screenshots, scanned documents, or photos of signs. Supported formats: JPEG, PNG, WebP. Max file size: 50 MB.

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Select language and process

Choose the text language (English, Simplified Chinese, or Traditional Chinese), then click Extract Text. The image is uploaded to an online OCR service for recognition, so an internet connection is required; results usually arrive within a few seconds and the request is abandoned after 30 seconds.

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Copy or download text

Review the extracted text, make corrections in the editor, then copy to clipboard or download as a .txt file. The text area is editable for easy fixes.

What is OCR Tool?

The OCR tool sends your image to a third-party online OCR service (OCR.space) and shows the text that service returns. It supports English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. It is free and needs no account, but the image does leave your device while it is being recognised, so it is not the right tool for confidential documents.

Why use OCR Tool?

Recognition happens on a third-party service rather than in your browser, so images are uploaded while they are processed. Do not use it for contracts, medical records, ID cards or other sensitive documents. What you get in return is no registration, no multi-megabyte language model to download, and no per-page fee.

lockComplete privacy — This tool is one of the few that need outside help: the image you choose is sent to a third-party text-recognition service to be read. Nothing else you do here leaves your device, and every other tool on this site works entirely in your browser.
boltInstant processing — No wait times, no server queues.
money_off100% free — No subscriptions, no credits, no hidden fees.
person_offNo registration — Start using immediately, no account needed.
devicesWorks everywhere — Any modern browser on desktop, tablet, or mobile.

How it works

Students photograph textbook pages and extract readable text for note-taking or translation using this tool. Professionals receive scanned PDFs or image-based documents and use it to extract text for editing in word processors. Developers testing OCR pipelines use it to quickly benchmark recognition accuracy on their specific document types before committing to a backend implementation.

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Pro Tip

OCR accuracy improves significantly with higher-resolution images and strong contrast between text and background — if your result has many errors, try increasing the image resolution to at least 300 DPI and ensuring the text appears dark on a light background before reprocessing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. The image is uploaded to a third-party OCR service (OCR.space), which performs the recognition and returns the text. Do not use this tool for contracts, medical records, financial statements, ID documents or anything else you would not want to hand to a third party. The service is called with a public demo key, so it is rate limited and may occasionally be unavailable.

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Tutorial