---
title: "Image to Text (OCR) — Free, Private, Local | Compress Pro"
description: "Extract text from images right in your browser — Tesseract OCR in 8 languages, run entirely on your device. No uploads, no accounts, no limits. Free."
canonical: https://compress-pro.com/image-to-text
---

# Extract text from images.

> Words read out of images, right on your device — free OCR.

Extract text from images entirely in your browser — **screenshots, photos of documents, scans and whiteboards, recognized on your own device**. Pick the document language, drop the images, and each one comes back as a .txt file. Nothing is ever uploaded.

**No uploads · No ads · Free & open source.**

## How it works

1. Drop files anywhere on the page, click to browse, or paste with Ctrl/⌘ + V.
2. Pick a quality or preset — or set an exact target size and let the tool find it.
3. Compress, compare before/after, and download — individually or as a ZIP.

## What OCR reads well — and what it does not

Printed text is the sweet spot: books, receipts, screenshots, signs and scans recognize reliably when the text is sharp and reasonably horizontal. Handwriting is not — cursive and freeform notes come out garbled, and no browser OCR changes that honestly. Resolution matters too: if you can barely read it zoomed in, neither can the recognizer. Scanned PDFs have their own tool — [OCR PDF](https://compress-pro.com/ocr-pdf) keeps the pages and adds a searchable layer.

## Eight languages, downloaded once

Recognition models for English, Slovenian, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Croatian ship with the site — the one you pick (1–2 MB) downloads on first use and stays cached, so later runs work offline. Choosing the right language matters: an English model reading German text will miss every umlaut.

## Under the hood

Recognition runs on Tesseract — the open-source OCR engine that has read the world’s paper for decades — compiled to WebAssembly and running in a worker on your device. The page you are on only ever serves files; your images, the recognized text and the language models all live and die in your browser. That is also why there are no page limits and no queues: your hardware does the reading.

## Frequently asked questions

### Which languages are supported?

English, Slovenian, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Croatian. Pick the document’s language before running — recognition quality depends on it.

### Does it read handwriting?

Not usefully — Tesseract is built for printed text. Clean print recognizes well; cursive and freeform handwriting come out garbled.

### Why is my result poor?

Usually resolution or language: blurry, small or skewed text defeats any OCR, and the wrong language model misses accented characters. Use a sharper capture and double-check the language picker.

### Are my images uploaded?

No — the pixels never leave your machine. Decoding and re-encoding both happen in your browser; there is no upload to wait for and no server-side copy to worry about afterwards. Want proof? Run one file through, switch your connection off, and run another — it still works.

## Related tools

- [Make scanned PDFs searchable](https://compress-pro.com/ocr-pdf)
- [Remove EXIF data](https://compress-pro.com/remove-exif)
- [Compress images](https://compress-pro.com/compress-image)

---

Part of [Compress Pro](https://compress-pro.com/) — every tool page has a markdown twin at `<page url>.md`. Full tool index: [llms.txt](https://compress-pro.com/llms.txt)