Convert JPG to text
Turn a photo of a page into words you can copy, edit and search.
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How it works
Add your images
Drag and drop, paste, or pick files. They upload over an encrypted connection.
Pick a quality or a target size
Use the quality slider, or tell it exactly how many KB or MB you need.
Download
Save each file, or grab them all at once as a ZIP.
A photo of a document is a picture of words, and a computer cannot do anything with a picture of words. It cannot search them, quote them or paste them into an email. Text recognition closes that gap. Add a JPG of a printed page and the words in it appear in a box, as ordinary text, which you can copy with one click or save as a .txt file.
Recognition is done on our own servers by Tesseract, a long-established open-source engine. It has been given two languages here, English and Slovenian. Tell it which of the two appear in the picture; the right choice matters most for letters such as č, š and ž. Each result comes with a confidence figure, and a warning is shown when the engine itself is unsure.
A stack of JPGs can be added together and their texts saved in one download. The photos travel encrypted, are read once and are deleted, and the words go back to your browser and nowhere else.
Why photos are harder to read than scans
A scanner presses the paper flat, lights it evenly and looks at it squarely. A phone photo does none of that. The page curves, one corner is in shadow, and the camera sits at an angle, so the lines of text slope and the letters at the far edge are smaller than those at the near one. On top of that comes JPEG compression, which leaves a faint shimmer around every letter.
The engine copes with a good deal of this. Before reading, the picture is turned to greyscale, its contrast is stretched, and small images are enlarged. But a few seconds of care with the camera do more than any processing. Hold the phone parallel to the page, fill the frame with the text, use daylight without flash, and wait for the focus to settle.
Prepare the picture, then read it
When a result is poor, the photo can often be rescued before trying again. Cut off whatever is not writing: table edges, fingers, the pattern of the desk, a neighbouring column you do not need. If the page was photographed sideways, turn it upright first, because lines running up the picture are read badly or not at all. Both can be done with the crop and rotate tools on this site, and the corrected JPG brought back here.
A resolution check helps too. Zoom in on the photo until one line of text fills the screen. If you can read it comfortably, so can the engine. If you have to guess at letters, take the picture again from closer.
What it reads well and what it does not
Printed text in ordinary fonts is its home ground: letters, contracts, book pages, forms, typed labels, signs photographed straight on. Text over a patterned background, stylised lettering on packaging, and anything handwritten are unreliable. Tables come back as lines of values without their grid, and a page set in two columns can come out with its lines interleaved.
Always proofread figures. An engine has no idea what a text means, so a 5 read as an S or a 0 read as an O looks perfectly plausible to it. Check every amount, date and reference number against the photo before you use it anywhere that matters.
Frequently asked questions
Which languages can it read from a JPG?
English and Slovenian. Select both when a page mixes them. Pages in German, French or other languages come out with mistakes in their accented letters.
Can it read handwriting?
Not dependably. Neat block capitals sometimes come through; joined-up writing rarely does.
Does the photo need to be high resolution?
It needs enough pixels in each letter. A page that fills a twelve-megapixel photo is more than enough. A page that is a small part of the photo is not.
What do I get as a result?
Plain text in a box you can edit, with buttons to copy it or download it as a .txt file. Layout, fonts and pictures are not reproduced.
Is the text stored?
No. Nothing is saved on our servers after the words have been sent to you, and the photo is deleted once it has been read.
Can I read several photos at once?
Yes. Add them together, for example the pages of one letter, and download all the texts in one go.