Need text from a screenshot? Extract it in your browser
Quick answer
Upload the screenshot to the OCR tool. Screenshots usually convert very accurately, since the text in them is typically crisp and high-contrast rather than photographed.
- 1Upload your screenshot.
- 2Choose Image to Text.
- 3Wait a few seconds for recognition.
- 4Copy or download the text.
Free, no sign-up, and your file is read on your own device rather than uploaded.
A screenshot is a picture, exactly like a photo, and the text inside it cannot be selected or copied for the same reason - there is no real text in a PNG or JPG, only pixels. This comes up constantly with error messages, chat conversations, articles behind a login, and slides shared as images rather than documents.
Screenshots tend to OCR especially well compared to a photographed page: the text is rendered crisply by whatever screen captured it, without the blur, glare or skew a camera photo can introduce.
Step by step
Check the result
Screenshots usually convert with very high accuracy given their sharp, high-contrast text.
OCR Text Extractor
Tips
- A screenshot cropped tightly to just the relevant text converts more reliably than a full-screen capture with a lot of unrelated interface around the text.
- If the screenshot includes a chat bubble or a card with a background image behind the text, contrast can suffer - a plainer background converts more reliably.
- For a screenshot of a table with rows and columns of numbers, check the result carefully - OCR reads text left to right and can occasionally jumble complex table layouts.
Common problems
A screenshot of a chat or app produced messy results.
Crop the screenshot to just the text you need first - icons, avatars and decorative elements around real text can confuse recognition.
Numbers or a table came out in the wrong order.
OCR reads left to right, top to bottom - a complex table layout does not always survive that assumption. Check the result carefully against the original for anything table-shaped.
Frequently asked questions
- Do screenshots OCR better than photos?
- Generally yes - screenshot text is rendered sharply with no blur, glare or camera angle to work around, so accuracy tends to be higher than for a photographed page.
- Is my screenshot uploaded to a server?
- No. Recognition happens entirely in your browser, on your own device.
- Can I extract text from a screenshot with a table?
- Yes, though a complex table layout is worth double-checking afterwards - OCR can occasionally read cells in an unexpected order.
Related OCR tools
Related articles
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Can't copy text from an image? Here's how to extract it
Upload the image to the OCR tool, and the text is read and returned as real, selectable text you can copy or download - typically within a few seconds.
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How to convert an image to text
Upload the JPG, PNG or WebP file to the OCR tool and it reads the text in the image, returning it as real text you can copy or download as a .txt file.
Ready to do it?
Free, no sign-up, and nothing is uploaded to a server.