How to Extract Text from an Image

You can turn any clear photo, scan, or screenshot into copyable text in under a minute. This guide walks you through the fastest workflow with ScanText — no account and no desktop software required.

Start with a sharp image: good lighting, minimal blur, and straight alignment. For screenshots, paste directly with Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on Mac) instead of saving a file first — this is the fastest path for error messages, chat snippets, and slides.

Open ScanText at scantext.net, upload or paste your image, and wait a few seconds. By default OCR runs in your browser when possible, so your file often never leaves your device. If you need maximum accuracy on difficult scans, use the optional clearer scan mode — temporary server processing deletes files in about 60 seconds.

Review the extracted text in the preview panel, then copy to clipboard or download TXT/DOCX. For Arabic, Hindi, or mixed-language documents, pick the matching language in the tool before running OCR to improve RTL and script accuracy.