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Image OCR Online Free — PrivaTools

TL;DR: Upload an image with text and copy the extracted text — Tesseract OCR runs server-side and supports 100+ languages.

Extract text from images online for free using OCR. Upload photos of documents, screenshots, receipts, or handwritten notes. Supports 40+ languages via Tesseract. Private and instant.

Image OCR is part of PrivaTools — a free, open-source alternative to iLovePDF, Smallpdf, and Adobe. Server-side tools process your file in an isolated container and discard it immediately; many tools never upload at all and run entirely in your browser.

How to Use Image OCR

  1. Upload an image — JPG, PNG, TIFF, WebP up to 500 MB.
  2. Select OCR language — 17 Tesseract languages available: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Arabic, Hindi, Vietnamese.
  3. Download as text or JSON — Plain text: all detected text. JSON: text + per-word bounding boxes for layout-aware processing.

Frequently Asked Questions

How accurate is the OCR?

Tesseract handles clean printed text very well (98%+). Handwriting, low-resolution, or low-contrast images are harder.

Should I preprocess the image first?

Deskew helps a lot for tilted scans. Convert to grayscale doesn't help (Tesseract converts internally).

What about handwriting?

Tesseract is trained on print. Use a specialized handwriting OCR for cursive.

Last reviewed 2026-05-01 by the PrivaTools maintainers. Source code on (MIT-licensed, self-hostable).

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