Free OCR tool

Convert a screenshot into text you can actually use.

Turn a screenshot into plain text you can paste into an email, a doc, or a note. Conversion runs on your device — no upload, no signup, no limits.

Drop a screenshot here

or

PNG, JPG, WebP · English text works best

Runs in your browser with open-source OCR (Tesseract via WebAssembly). Your image never leaves your device.

Extracted text

Choose an image to extract its text.

Need the link behind a title with no visible URL? That is what SnapAction does.

How the conversion works, and what it won't do

Converting a screenshot to text runs Tesseract, an open-source OCR engine compiled to WebAssembly, entirely inside your browser tab. There is no server round-trip: the moment you drop in a screenshot, recognition starts on your device, and the result lands in the text box on the right — ready to paste into an email, a ticket, a document, or a note.

One honest caveat: conversion returns plain text, not a formatted document. Bold, tables, columns, and font styling from the original screenshot are not preserved — you get the words, in reading order, without the layout. For quotes, error messages, chat logs, and code snippets that's exactly what you want; for a screenshot of a complex table or slide, expect to tidy up line breaks afterward.

Converting to text is one step. Recovering the resource is another.

Converting to plain text is the right move when you need the words. It's the wrong tool when what you actually saved was a resource — a repo, a booking, a product page — because a text conversion can't hand you a link that was never visible in the screenshot to begin with.

SnapAction's screenshot AI covers that gap on iPhone: it identifies the resource a screenshot represents, recovers the canonical link with AI analysis and web search when enough context is visible, and stores the result as a typed card with a next action, rather than a block of unformatted text. Read more in OCR vs resource extraction.

Try 30 free scansExplore use cases →

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Convert screenshot to text: questions

How do I convert a screenshot to text?

Drop the screenshot into the converter above or choose a file. OCR runs in your browser and returns plain text, ready to copy or download as a .txt file.

Can I convert a screenshot to a Word document or PDF?

Not directly. The converter outputs plain text, which you can copy or download as a .txt file and paste into Word, Google Docs, or any editor yourself.

Does converting a screenshot to text keep the original formatting?

No. OCR returns plain text in reading order — bold, tables, columns, and layout from the screenshot are not preserved.

Is there a limit to how many screenshots I can convert?

No. The tool is free with no signup and no usage limit, since conversion runs on your own device rather than a server.

Are screenshots uploaded when I convert them?

No. Conversion happens locally via WebAssembly. Nothing is sent to a server.