Free Online OCR (Local & Private)
“Online OCR” usually means uploading documents to someone’s server. This one runs the OCR engine in your browser instead — same convenience, none of the exposure. Free, 20 languages, no account.
Privacy-first: every image is processed locally in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, stored or transmitted to any server.
Online tool, offline-grade privacy
The documents people OCR are the sensitive ones — invoices, IDs, medical letters, contracts. Classic online OCR services process them server-side, subject to whatever their retention policy says. Here the engine itself (Tesseract, compiled to WebAssembly) downloads to your browser once, and every recognition after that is a purely local computation. There is no server-side processing to trust, because there is none at all.
No limits where there is no server
Because your device does the work, the usual online-OCR restrictions disappear: no pages-per-day quota, no file-size ceiling, no premium tier. Run as many images as you like in any of 20 languages — up to three simultaneously for mixed-language pages — and take the result as clipboard text or a downloaded .txt file.
Frequently asked questions
- Is my image uploaded to extract the text?
- No. Recognition runs on your own device using a WebAssembly build of the Tesseract OCR engine. Documents, IDs, letters and screenshots never touch a server.
- Why is there a one-time download?
- The OCR engine (≈5 MB) and a trained data pack for each language you select (≈1–3 MB each) have to reach your browser once. You are told the size before anything downloads, and everything is cached locally — later runs work instantly, even offline.
- Which languages are supported?
- Twenty: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and Estonian. You can select up to three at once for mixed-language images.
- How accurate is it?
- On clean screenshots and scans, very accurate. Photos work best when the text is sharp, well-lit and roughly horizontal. A confidence score is shown with every result, and the output is editable so you can fix stray characters before copying.
- What can I do with the result?
- The extracted text appears in an editable box — copy it with one click or download it as a .txt file named after your image.
- Can it read handwriting?
- No — like most OCR engines it is built for printed and on-screen text. Neat block capitals sometimes work, but cursive handwriting is not supported.