How to Extract Text from Scanned PDFs and Images — Free OCR

When You Need OCR

A colleague sent a scanned contract and you need to quote specific sections. Your professor shared lecture slides as images. An old document exists only as a photocopy. A receipt needs to go into your expense tracker. In all these cases, the text exists visually but is not selectable or copyable. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) reads the image and gives you editable text.

Extract Text from Images and Screenshots

1. Open the Screenshot Text Extractor
2. Upload your image (JPG, PNG, screenshot, photo)
3. OCR processes the image and extracts all visible text
4. Copy the text or download it

Works with photos of documents, screenshots of web pages, photos of whiteboards, book pages, business cards — anything with visible text.

Extract Text from Scanned PDFs

Scanned PDFs are just images wrapped in a PDF container — the text is not selectable. To extract it:

1. Open the PDF OCR tool
2. Upload your scanned PDF
3. The tool processes each page with OCR
4. Download the extracted text or a searchable PDF

For multi-page scans, this is faster than processing each page as a separate image.

Batch OCR — Multiple Images at Once

Have 20 scanned pages? Use the Batch OCR tool to process them all at once. Upload all images, get all text extracted in order. Perfect for digitizing multi-page documents that aren't in PDF format.

Tips for Better OCR Results

• Resolution matters — 300 DPI scans produce the best OCR results. Phone photos work but are less accurate than proper scans.
• Contrast helps — dark text on white background gives the best accuracy. Colored backgrounds, watermarks, and low contrast reduce accuracy.
• Straight alignment — OCR works best on text that is horizontally aligned. Rotated or skewed text reduces accuracy.
• Clean images — smudges, creases, and shadows on paper reduce accuracy. Flatten the document before photographing.

Specialized OCR Tools

Beyond general text extraction, we have tools for specific document types:

• Receipt Scanner — extracts merchant, date, items, and totals from receipts
• Business Card Scanner — extracts name, phone, email, and company
• Table Extractor — extracts tabular data from images into spreadsheet format
• Handwriting to Text — converts handwritten notes to digital text