Image to Text: Free AI OCR
Extract text from photos: receipts, signs, screenshots, documents, handwriting, and whiteboards. AI beats basic OCR on messy scripts and math. Free, no signup, with plain / Markdown / LaTeX output.
Drag and drop, upload, or take a photo
JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, and HEIC. HEIC is decoded on your device.
Use plain text for copy-paste into anywhere. Markdown for notes apps. LaTeX for equations and STEM homework. Change format and click Extract again to regenerate.
How to Use
- 1Photograph or screenshot the text with good lighting and minimal glare
- 2Upload the image or paste from clipboard
- 3Pick plain text, Markdown, or LaTeX
- 4Extract, then copy or download
Great For
Receipts & invoices
Digitize amounts and line items without retypingSigns & labels
Capture storefront signs, product labels, or packaging textScreenshots
Pull text from app screenshots, chats, or error messagesClass notes
Convert lecture handwriting without retypingWhiteboards
Capture meeting boards before they get erasedMath homework
Export equations as LaTeX for Overleaf or MarkdownFrequently Asked Questions
Can this extract text from any image?
Yes, in nearly all practical cases. Image to Text (OCR) is Instant Tools' free AI-powered OCR tool: upload a photo of a receipt, street sign, screenshot, scanned PDF page, printed document, handwritten note, or whiteboard, and a multimodal AI model reads the visible text and returns it as editable output. Because it uses a full vision-language model rather than pure pattern-matching character recognition, it holds up noticeably better than basic Tesseract-based free OCR tools on messy, angled, low-contrast, or handwritten input, cases where traditional OCR engines tend to produce garbled output or fail outright. Image quality still matters: a clear, well-lit, in-focus photo produces cleaner text than a blurry or heavily shadowed one, so a quick retake beats trying to fix bad output after the fact.
How is this different from the AI Image Analyzer?
The two tools are built for different jobs even though both use AI vision. Image to Text (OCR) is purpose-built for extraction: its entire output is copy-pasteable text in plain text, Markdown, or LaTeX, formatted specifically to preserve line breaks, structure, and equations so you can drop it straight into a document or notes app. The AI Image Analyzer, by contrast, answers questions about what's in a photo, identifying objects, reviewing a profile picture, estimating meal calories, or answering a custom prompt, and its output is descriptive analysis, not a faithful text transcript. If your goal is 'get the words out of this image', use OCR; if your goal is 'tell me about this image', use AI Image Analyzer. The two are complementary, not interchangeable.
What languages are supported?
The underlying Gemini model handles a wide range of languages and scripts, including Latin-alphabet languages, CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), Cyrillic, and Arabic script, among others, with no language selector needed since it detects the script automatically from the image. Accuracy across languages tracks image quality more than language choice: a clear, high-contrast photo in a less common language typically outperforms a blurry photo in English, so the biggest accuracy lever you control is lighting, focus, and framing, not which language you're extracting. Dense small text, stylized fonts, and heavy cursive handwriting remain the hardest cases across every language, since those push the limits of what any current OCR model, human handwriting expertise included, can reliably parse.
Can it extract math equations?
Yes. Switch the output mode to LaTeX or Markdown before extracting, and equations are returned in proper $...$ (inline) or $$...$$ (display) LaTeX delimiters instead of being flattened into plain unstructured text, which is what makes them usable in notes apps, papers, and anywhere else that renders LaTeX or Markdown math. This works for both printed equations (textbook pages, slides, problem sets) and reasonably neat handwritten math, though very dense or heavily abbreviated handwritten notation is harder for any AI model to parse correctly, so it's worth double-checking extracted equations against the source image before relying on them, the same way you'd proofread any OCR output.
Is my photo stored?
No. Instant Tools does not store the photo you upload for OCR extraction; it's sent to one of several AI providers, primarily Google Gemini, with free-provider fallbacks when that tier is busy, purely to read the text out of it, and is discarded on our side immediately after the extracted text is returned to you. The image does pass through the active provider's infrastructure for that one processing step, and the provider's own data-handling terms govern that brief window, so avoid uploading images containing sensitive personal or financial data you wouldn't want processed by a third party. Nothing about the image or the extracted text is logged, retained, or associated with you on Instant Tools' side.
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