Image to text

How to convert an image to text

Choose or drop a PNG, JPG or WebP image: a photo of a page, a screenshot, or a scan saved as an image. The text is read in your browser and appears in an editable box. Check it, correct anything that was misread, then copy it or download it as a .txt file.

• Step 1 — choose the image (up to 20 MB).
• Step 2 — wait while the reader works; a progress line shows how far it is.
• Step 3 — check and edit the text, then copy it or download the .txt file.

Private by design

The file never leaves your device. The reading runs inside your browser with an open-source OCR engine (Tesseract), so nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored and no AI service sees it. You can even disconnect from the internet once the page and the reader have loaded.

Getting a good result

Optical character recognition (OCR) depends on the picture. Photograph the page flat, straight and in even light, fill the frame with the text, and avoid shadows and glare. Printed text works best; handwriting, very small print, heavy blur and decorative fonts are often misread. A screenshot is usually clearer than a photo of a screen.

This tool reads English and other Latin-alphabet text. For Arabic, use the free Arabic OCR tool, which reads on our servers.

The first run

The first time you use a browser tool, your browser downloads the reader — a few megabytes — from mahadocr.com and keeps it. Later runs start much faster. On an older phone a full page can take a little while; keep the page open until the result appears.

When you need more than text

These free tools give you plain text or a simple table. If you need named fields — an invoice number, a passport’s date of birth, a CV’s work history — checked and marked ✓ confirmed or ⚠ check it, use the Mahad OCR API. It reads documents on our servers, returns JSON, and has a free Sandbox plan to try it.

Frequently asked questions