Photo to Text Converter

You photograph a page in a library book, a notice board at work, a recipe in a friend's kitchen, a slide at a conference, and later you want the words, not the picture. Retyping is slow; this page reads the text out of the photo and hands it to you as editable text to copy or save as a .txt file. It recognises printed and on-screen text in English, Portuguese, Spanish and Hindi, and the recognition engine runs inside your browser, so a photo of a contract, a prescription or a bank letter stays on your phone.

How you take the photo decides most of the accuracy. Hold the camera square to the page so the lines run straight across the frame, fill the frame with the text, and shoot in even light without a shadow from your hand or phone. Printed text at a normal size under those conditions reads back well. Tilted, dim or blurred photos lose characters, and a page curving into the spine of a book does too. Handwriting is the weak spot: neat capitals might work, joined-up script generally does not. Tables lose their columns and come out as plain lines.

If the photo is skewed, pass it through the Document Scanner on this site first; the straightened page recognises far better than the original.