How to copy text from an image
- Add your image. Click the box and pick a photo, screenshot or scan, or paste one with Ctrl+V (⌘V on a Mac). On a phone you can take a photo of the page. JPG, PNG, WebP and iPhone HEIC all work.
- Pick the language and extract. English is ready straight away. Other languages download their data once (1–3 MB), then start from your browser’s storage.
- Copy or download the text. Fix any misread words in the box, then copy it or save it as a .txt file.
Good to know
- Printed text reads best. Documents, screenshots, receipts, book pages and signs work well. Handwriting usually doesn’t.
- One language at a time. Pick the language the text is written in. In Hindi or Marathi mode, English words mixed into the text are read less accurately.
- Sharp and straight wins. A well-lit photo taken straight on, cropped to the text, gives far fewer mistakes than a blurry or angled one. Crop & rotate it first if needed.
- Plain text out. You get the words and line breaks. Fonts, columns, tables and images aren’t kept.
- Powered by Tesseract. The open-source Tesseract OCR engine, compiled to WebAssembly, does the reading on your device.
Nothing from your document goes to a server
Most online OCR sites, and every “AI” text extractor, upload your picture to their servers or to a language model to read it. Here, the OCR engine runs inside this browser tab. Your image, and the text found in it, stay on your own device: no server and no AI ever sees them. That matters for ID cards, bank statements and anything else you wouldn’t hand to a stranger.
The engine and the English data come from this site. For any other language, your browser downloads only that language’s data file, once, from the jsDelivr CDN, and keeps it for next time. That’s a download to you, not an upload of your image. You can check: open your browser’s developer tools, watch the Network tab, and extract some text. How InTheTab works
You’ll also see a few small requests to Google Analytics. That’s our visit counter, and it never receives your files. Privacy policy
Questions
How do I copy text from an image?
Open InTheTab’s image to text tool, drop, paste or photograph the image, pick the language and click Extract text. The text appears in a box you can edit, copy or download as a .txt file. It runs in your browser, so the image is never uploaded.
Does this use AI or ChatGPT to read my document?
No. InTheTab’s image to text tool uses Tesseract, an open-source OCR engine, running inside your browser tab. No LLM, chatbot or AI service sees your document, and nothing from it, neither the image nor the text found in it, is sent to any server, ours included.
Is my image uploaded to a server?
No. InTheTab’s image to text tool reads the text with Tesseract OCR running inside your browser tab, so the image never leaves your device. For languages other than English, the tab downloads that language’s data file once from jsDelivr; that is a download to you, not an upload of your image. We never get your files or text: the site has no accounts, and its only analytics, Google Analytics, counts visits without ever seeing what you add here.
Which languages can it read?
InTheTab’s image to text tool reads English, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Odia and Urdu. English works straight away; each other language downloads a data file of 1 to 3 MB the first time you use it, which your browser then keeps.
Can it read handwriting?
Not reliably. Tesseract OCR, which this tool uses, is made for printed or typed text such as documents, screenshots, signs and receipts. Neat block capitals sometimes work; joined-up handwriting usually comes out garbled.
How do I get better OCR results?
Use a sharp, well-lit photo taken straight on, with the text filling most of the picture. Crop away anything that isn’t text and choose the language the text is written in. Screenshots and scans usually read almost perfectly; blurry, angled or low-contrast photos give more mistakes.