How to Extract Text from an Image (JPG, PNG, HEIC) — Free & Private

To extract text from a JPG, PNG, WebP, or HEIC image, open Zro7 Image to Text, drag the file in, choose the language, and hit Recognize. The recognized text appears in seconds with per-word confidence highlighting. Nothing is uploaded — Tesseract.js runs in your browser.

Which formats work

• JPG / PNG / WebP / BMP / TIFF — decoded natively by the browser.
• HEIC (iPhone photos) — Zro7 auto-converts via HEIC to JPG under the hood before OCR.
• PDF — use PDF OCR instead; it rasterizes pages and runs Tesseract on each.
• SVG — not useful; extract text with an XML parser instead.

Tips for cleaner output

1. Straighten the image — even a 5° tilt drops accuracy noticeably. Rotate before OCR.
2. Crop tightly — remove backgrounds, tables of contents, page numbers.
3. Boost contrast — dark grey on light grey confuses the segmenter. Convert to pure black-on-white if needed.
4. Screenshot at 2× — for on-screen text, take a Retina-density screenshot rather than a small crop.
5. Pick the right language — 'eng' is fastest; add languages only for actual multilingual pages.

Common gotchas

• Handwriting — Tesseract wasn't trained for it. Use a phone with on-device handwriting recognition instead.
• Stylized fonts — logos, script fonts, and heavy calligraphy will be near-random.
• Two-column layouts — enable 'Auto' page segmentation mode; without it, Tesseract may read across columns.
• Text on top of photos — subtitle-style overlays work; text embedded in busy scenery does not.

Steps

1. Open Image to Text.
2. Drop your image (JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP…).
3. Pick language(s) and hit Recognize.
4. Copy the text or download .txt. Use Receipt Scanner or Business Card Reader for structured output.