Free OCR online — text recognition right in your browser.

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To a computer, a scan, photo or screenshot is just an image: you can see the text, but you can't copy a line or fix a number. Online OCR turns that image into plain text. Here the job is done by Tesseract, an open-source text recognition engine. It runs right in the browser on your phone or computer.

Tesseract relies on language models, so for OCR in Ukrainian, Russian or English it matters which languages are switched on. The tool prepares the photo by itself: it straightens a slight tilt, turns a page that lies sideways or upside down, enlarges small screenshots and inverts the colors if a screenshot was taken in dark mode. The result is clean text you can correct, copy or save as a .txt file.

How to reduce OCR errors

  1. Turn on only the languages the text is written in: with an extra language, look-alike letters such as the Cyrillic and Latin “c” get mixed up more often, and recognition slows down a little.
  2. The smaller the font, the more resolution matters: scan at 300 dpi, and when taking a photo, move closer instead of using digital zoom.
  3. For good contrast, shoot in daylight, with no shadow from the phone and no flash, which leaves glare on the paper.
  4. Shoot straight from above: the tool only fixes a slight tilt on its own. Trim margins and background with the “Crop” frame, and the text is recognized again.

What OCR reads well and what it doesn't

Reads well

  • A printed page shot straight and sharp
  • Screenshots of emails, websites and apps
  • Fresh receipts, before the thermal paper fades

Reads poorly

  • Handwriting: hand-printed letters sometimes, fast cursive almost never
  • Stamps and signatures: on top of text they can produce “garbage”
  • Tables and columns: a table row becomes a line of text

OCR in the browser: from language to .txt

  1. Check the language switches: Ukrainian and English are on by default; turn off the one you don't need and turn on the one you do.
  2. Add a photo, scan or screenshot: drag the file in, press “Choose photos” or paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac).
  3. If a photo is still sideways, press “Rotate” on its card; retake a shot marked “Unclear” closer and straighter.
  4. Fix any errors on the sheet, choose “As in the photo” or “Join lines”, then copy the text or download a .txt file.

Where online OCR helps at work

  • A contract with English names A scan of a Ukrainian contract where company names, email addresses and websites are written in Latin script. Keep Ukrainian and English on: both parts are recognized in one pass.
  • A letter in Russian A supplier sent a photo of a warranty letter in Russian via Viber. Turn on Russian: without it, the tool reads such text noticeably worse, and you'll have more to fix on the sheet.
  • A warehouse without internet In a warehouse or an archive, the phone barely gets a signal. Add the OCR tool to your home screen and recognize one photo while you're online; after that, delivery notes are recognized without internet too.

Questions

What is OCR in simple terms?

OCR stands for optical character recognition. The program finds lines of text in an image, recognizes the letters in them and puts them together into words. The result is text you can search.

Why only three languages, and how do I choose them?

Each language needs its own model, and the tool has three: Ukrainian, Russian and English, no others. The switches set the language of the text in the photo, not the language of the site. If a document mixes two languages, turn on both; your choice is remembered.

Does online OCR work without internet?

Yes, after the first recognition. That's when the browser downloads the language models, a few megabytes, which adds a few seconds. After that, the models come from the browser's memory, so no connection is needed.

What affects accuracy the most?

Above all, sharpness and letter size: on a clear scan of printed text there are usually just a few errors. The typical mistake is mixing up similar characters: O and 0, I and 1, Latin and Cyrillic look-alikes. Check amounts, numbers, IBANs and codes against the original.

Is there a limit on the number of pages?

Pages are added as photos: you can select several and add more, and the texts are combined into one in the order you added them. On a computer it takes seconds per photo, longer on a phone. Turn a PDF into images first with the “PDF to JPG” tool.

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