Convert PNG to text
Copy the words out of a screenshot without typing them again.
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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.
Screenshots are how text gets trapped. Somebody sends a picture of an error message when you needed the message itself. A slide deck arrives as images. A setting, a licence key or a paragraph is visible on screen and cannot be selected. Add the PNG here and the text comes out as text: it appears in a box you can edit, copy with one click or download as a .txt file.
Screenshots are the easiest thing a recognition engine is ever given. The letters are perfectly formed and straight, with no camera, no shadow and no paper in between. Results are usually close to flawless for ordinary interface text and documents.
The reading happens on our own servers, with language data for English and Slovenian. Uploads are encrypted, the image is discarded once it has been read, and the recognised text is not stored.
Small text is the usual obstacle
On a standard-density screen, interface text is only ten or twelve pixels tall, at the lower edge of what a recognition engine can tell apart. For that reason every image is enlarged before it is read, until its shorter side reaches a thousand pixels, and its contrast is stretched. This is done for you and usually suffices.
You can help in two ways when taking the screenshot. Zoom the application or the browser to 150 or 200 percent first, so the letters themselves are drawn larger. And capture only the region that holds the text you want. A tight crop of a paragraph is read better than the same paragraph lost in a screenshot of two monitors.
Dark mode, code and tables
Light text on a dark background is read less reliably than dark on light, because the engine was trained mainly on printed pages. If a dark-mode screenshot comes back with gaps, switch the application to its light theme and capture it again.
Source code and terminal output need a careful eye afterwards. Indentation is not preserved exactly, and characters that matter in code and hardly ever occur in prose are easily confused: a lower-case L with a 1 or a vertical bar, a zero with a capital O, quotes with backticks. A table comes back row by row without its lines. For a spreadsheet, it is usually quicker to paste the recognised text into a column and split it than to retype the numbers.
Before you share what was in the screenshot
Text recognition makes the contents of a screenshot portable, and that deserves a second look. A capture taken for one line often includes other things: an email address in a corner, a customer's name in a list, an internal address in a title bar, a notification that popped up at the wrong moment. Once the whole image has become plain text, those travel with the copy and paste.
Crop the PNG to the part you need before you read it, with the crop tool on this site or the editor of your operating system, and only that part becomes text.
Frequently asked questions
Does it work on screenshots from phones?
Yes. Phone screenshots are sharp and high in resolution, which suits recognition well. Crop away the status bar and the keyboard first.
Why were some characters read wrongly in my code?
Characters that look alike, such as l, 1 and |, or 0 and O, are hard to separate without knowing the context. Check code character by character before running it.
Can it keep the layout of a table?
No. You get the cell contents as lines of text. Columns have to be rebuilt in a spreadsheet.
Which languages are supported?
English and Slovenian, separately or together.
Is a transparent PNG a problem?
No. Transparent areas are placed on white before reading, so dark text on a transparent background is read normally.
Is a JPG screenshot worse than a PNG?
Slightly. JPEG compression blurs the edges of small letters. If you can choose, save screenshots as PNG.