Read the words in JPEG photos of paper, from receipts and contracts to whiteboards, with clean-up for shadows and camera blur. Nothing is uploaded, and there’s no account, watermark or limit.
Drop your JPG or JPEG photos onto the drop zone, or tap “or tap to choose files” to pick them from your gallery.
Make sure the right “Text language” is checked. Leave “Enhance image” on: it lifts shadows and greyish paper from camera shots.
Press “Extract text from 1 file” (the count follows the number of photos) and watch the progress on each one.
Open “Show text”, check the confidence rating, and use “Copy text” or “Download .txt”.
JPEG is the format phones use for almost every photo, and it saves space by throwing away fine detail. Around sharp letter edges that loss shows up as soft halos and blocky ripples. On a large, well-lit photo it hardly matters; on a small or heavily compressed one, a thin e can blur into a c and an r next to an n can look like an m.
Messaging apps make this worse. A picture forwarded through WhatsApp or similar chats is usually shrunk and recompressed, so the copy you received holds much less detail than the original. If you can, ask for the original file or a document attachment instead of a photo.
Phones also store the camera orientation in the EXIF data rather than rotating the pixels. filetidy reads that tag and turns the picture upright before recognition, so a page photographed sideways is still read in the right direction.
iPhone & iPad
This copies text but keeps no file. For a batch of saved JPGs, or to get .txt files, the browser tool is quicker.
Android
Mac
PNG is lossless, so the edges of letters stay crisp, which is why screenshots saved as PNG give near-perfect text. A JPG photo of paper is limited less by the format than by the camera: focus, light and angle matter far more than compression at normal quality.
Converting a JPG to PNG before OCR does not help. The detail lost when the JPEG was saved is gone for good, and re-saving it as PNG just makes a bigger file holding the same blurry edges. Upload the JPG as it is.
What really improves the result is the shot itself. Light the page evenly, ideally near a window and without your shadow across it. Hold the phone parallel to the paper, because the engine does not correct perspective, and get close enough that the page fills the frame. Flatten books and folded letters, and tap to focus on the text before you take the picture.
Yes, if the print is still dark. Thermal receipts fade quickly, so photograph them soon. Prices and totals come out as lines of text rather than a table; check every amount, since a faint 8 can read as a 3.
Printed slides projected on a board work well. Marker handwriting is hit and miss: tidy capitals may be readable, joined writing usually is not. Avoid reflections from the lights by shooting slightly from the side, then crop.
Usually not. Phone cameras record the orientation in the file, and the tool applies it before reading. If a photo was rotated by an editor that dropped this information, rotate it in your gallery first.
Chat apps shrink and recompress pictures, so small text loses the detail OCR needs. Ask the sender for the original file, or send it as a document, and try again with that copy.
This tool gives plain text with no fonts or layout. Copy it and paste it into Word or Google Docs, then add headings and formatting there. Choose “Join into paragraphs” first so sentences are not broken at every line.
As many as you like. They are read one after another, each shows its own progress, and a damaged file shows an error without stopping the rest. Use “Download all (.zip)” to get one .txt per photo.
Last updated October 28, 2026
Enlarges small text, turns dark backgrounds light and evens out shadows. Try it off if letters come out broken.