A scanned mark sheet, a screenshot of an official notice, a photo of a printed government form — all have text locked inside a picture file. Retyping it is slow and error-prone. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) reads the image and gives you the text in under 10 seconds, ready to copy, edit, or paste anywhere.
Quick answer
- Go to easyPhoto Image to Text, upload your image, choose the language, click Extract Text.
- The result appears in a text box — copy it or download it as a .txt file in one click.
- Everything runs in your browser. Your image is never uploaded to any server.
When do you need image-to-text?
The most common situations for Indian users:
- Scanned certificates and mark sheets — university certificates are often scanned PDFs or photos; extracting the text lets you fill forms without retyping roll numbers, grades, and dates.
- Government notices and circulars — PDFs or screenshots of exam notifications contain important dates, eligibility rules, and fee details you need to reference quickly.
- Business cards and visiting cards — photograph the card and extract the phone number, email, and address into your contacts app.
- Printed forms you need to fill digitally — scan the blank form, extract the field names, then fill the digital version.
- Screenshots of text messages or notifications — when you have a screenshot but need to search or quote the text.
Step-by-step: extract text from an image
Open the Image to Text tool and follow these steps:
- Upload your image. Drag and drop a JPG, PNG, WebP, BMP or TIFF file onto the drop zone, or tap it to pick from your device. A preview appears immediately.
- Select the language. Choose English, Hindi, or English + Hindi. Getting the language right is the single biggest factor in accuracy — Devanagari characters will not be read correctly with the English model.
- Click Extract Text. The OCR engine loads on first use (about 4–5 MB downloaded once, then cached). A progress bar shows the recognition stage.
- Copy or download the result. The extracted text appears in an editable text box. Click Copy to paste it anywhere, or click .txt to save it as a text file with your original filename.
Tips for better OCR accuracy
The quality of the extracted text depends almost entirely on the quality of the input image. These steps make a significant difference:
| Problem | Fix |
|---|---|
| Blurry or out of focus | Retake the photo with better lighting; hold the camera steady |
| Skewed or tilted page | Use the Straighten Photo tool to level the image first |
| Low contrast (light ink on light paper) | Scan in greyscale mode, or boost contrast with any photo editor |
| Small or dense text | Scan at 300 DPI minimum; crop tightly to the text area before uploading |
| Mixed English + Hindi on the same page | Select English + Hindi from the language dropdown |
| Handwritten text | Tesseract handles print well but struggles with cursive handwriting — results will be partial |
Is it safe? Does anything get uploaded?
Nothing is uploaded. The OCR engine — Tesseract, an open-source project from HP Labs that is now maintained by Google — is compiled to WebAssembly and runs entirely inside your browser tab. Your image data never leaves your device. The only network requests are the one-time downloads of the engine (~3 MB) and the language model (~4 MB for English, ~7 MB for Hindi) which are cached after the first use.
This matters for sensitive documents: Aadhaar cards, mark sheets, salary slips, bank statements, and medical records can all be processed safely without the risk of a third-party server storing a copy.
What about extracting text from a PDF?
The image-to-text tool works on image files. If you have a PDF, use the PDF to JPG converter first to export each page as an image, then run OCR on the resulting JPG. For a digitally created PDF (not a scan), the text is already embedded — you can select and copy it directly without OCR.
Supported languages
The current tool supports three modes:
- English — Latin script documents, certificates, notices
- Hindi (Devanagari) — Hindi-language documents and government circulars in Hindi
- English + Hindi — Bilingual documents such as Indian government forms that mix both scripts on the same page
More languages (Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi) will be added as the tool matures. The Tesseract engine supports over 100 languages — it is a matter of bundling the additional training data.