How to Copy Text from a Photo on Your Phone

You take a photo of a notice board, a bill, a page from a book or a screenshot of a long message. Later you wish you could copy the words instead of typing them again. A tool that reads pictures can do that for you. It is called text recognition, or OCR, and you can use it on your phone in your browser, with nothing to install.

This guide shows how to do it, how to get a good result, and what to expect when the picture is not perfect.

What you need

• A photo, a screenshot or a PDF that contains pictures of pages
• A few minutes, and a connection for the very first use
• About 4 to 5 MB of data the first time, to download the reading engine (it is saved afterwards)

Step 1: Open the tool and choose your picture

Open Image to Text and tap the big box. Your phone offers its gallery, your files and the camera. You can choose several photos at once, or a PDF. iPhone photos in the HEIC format work too. The pictures are opened on your phone and are not uploaded anywhere.

Step 2: Pick the language of the text

English is already chosen. If the words in your picture are Hindi, Malayalam or Arabic, pick that language from the list. The size of the extra download is shown before you start, because each language has its own data file. Choosing the right language matters: the wrong one gives strange letters, even when the picture is perfect.

Step 3: Tap Read the text

The tool reads each picture or page in turn and shows its progress. A PDF is read page by page, so a long one takes a while on a phone. Keep the tab open until it says Done.

When it finishes, the words appear in a box. You can fix a mistake right there. Then:

• tap Copy text and paste it into a message, a note or a document
• tap Download to save it as a .txt file
• use Send it to share the text file with another app

How to get a cleaner result

Reading pictures is never perfect. A few habits make a big difference.

Take the photo straight on

Hold the phone parallel to the page, not at an angle. Slanted photos squash the letters and cause errors. Lay the page flat if you can.

Use good light and keep the phone steady

Shadows and glare confuse the reader. Daylight from a window is better than a lamp right above the page. Wait a moment for the focus to settle before you press the button.

Fill the frame with the text

Move closer, or crop the picture to the words you need. Our Resize Image tool can also help if a screenshot is huge. Do not zoom in so far that the letters become blurry.

Prefer printed text

Printed text and clean screenshots work best. Handwriting, fancy fonts, very small print and text over busy backgrounds are the hardest cases, and the result may need many corrections.

What the result can and cannot do

The reader gives you the words in the order it finds them. It does not copy fonts, colours, tables or the exact layout of the page. Columns can come out mixed together, and bullet points may turn into odd symbols. Treat the result as a first draft that saves you typing, not as an exact copy.

Check the parts that matter most before you use them. Numbers, dates, names, email addresses and phone numbers are the places where a single wrong character can cause a real problem.

Scanned PDFs and photos of documents

A scanned document is often just a picture inside a PDF, so its words cannot be selected. Choose the PDF in the tool and each page is turned into a picture and read. If you only need a few pages, use Split PDF first to keep just those pages, which saves time. If your pages are separate photos, you can also put them into one file with JPG to PDF after you have read them.

Privacy: what happens to your picture

Many online readers send your photo to a server. This one does not. The reading engine runs inside your browser, on your own device, so a photo of a bill or an ID letter never leaves your phone. After the first download, the tool also works without an internet connection.

If you want a deeper explanation of how that works, read Is it safe to use online PDF tools?.

A quick checklist

1. Photograph the page straight on, in good light.
2. Open Image to Text and choose the picture.
3. Pick the right language.
4. Tap Read the text and wait for Done.
5. Read the result, correct any mistakes, then copy or download it.

With a clear picture, a minute of work can save you a lot of typing.