OCR — How to Extract Text from Images and PDFs

OCR turns images of text into actual, editable text. Whether it's a screenshot, scanned document, or photo — here's how to extract the text.

Someone sends you a screenshot of a table. You need that data in a spreadsheet. You could retype it manually, or you could let OCR do it in seconds.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the technology that converts images of text into actual, editable, searchable text. It's been around for decades but has gotten remarkably good thanks to machine learning.

When you need OCR

Scanned documents. Old contracts, receipts, or forms that exist only as scans or photos. OCR makes them searchable and editable.

Screenshots. Error messages, code snippets, chat conversations — anything you screenshotted but now need the text from.

Photos of text. Whiteboards from meetings, book pages, business cards, restaurant menus, street signs.

PDF images. Some PDFs are just images of pages (scanned documents). They look like text but you can't select or copy anything. OCR extracts the actual text.

What affects accuracy

OCR accuracy depends on several factors: image resolution (higher is better), text clarity (printed text works better than handwriting), contrast (dark text on light background), and language. Clean, well-lit photos of printed text typically achieve 95%+ accuracy.

Extract text now

Toolozo's OCR tool supports 12+ languages including English, Turkish, German, French, and Spanish. Upload an image, select the language, and get the extracted text. Powered by Tesseract OCR — the same engine Google uses for Google Lens.