Image to text: OCR for a photo, screenshot or scan
A photo of a delivery note, a screenshot of a table, a scan of an old letter. You want the text, and which words to rely on. Which means: you stop retyping, and you know where to look when a word is shaky.
Drop a photo, screenshot or scan and read it free: text, with a box and a confidence for every word.
What you get back from an image
Text
The word itself.
Box
Its place on the page.
Confidence
How sure the reading is.
With the JSON format you also see where the OCR engine and the language model disagree. Check those words, and only those. In the pipelines that read characters, every word comes from the image, and a word that cannot be read is marked.
How to know which words of an OCR result to trust
A missing word
Easy to see.
A wrong digit
Looks right, and sits in a number someone will copy into a system.
These wrong values are counted next to the missing ones.
How accurate is image OCR on hard pages
| Result | What it is |
|---|---|
| 105 of 135 | Target values found by the character engine alone; 5 of them silently wrong. |
| 22 | target values the character engine alone missed. |
| 131 of 135 | Found by a language model with a word OCR engine; 0 silently wrong. |
Source: run on six hard pages, published in the gallery. The combination is a language-model pipeline. A photo taken sideways is read upright by the pipeline with page orientation (count on turned pages). Read more: why image OCR fails
Review only the unsure words
- Send the image and ask for
format=json. - Collect the words below a confidence you choose.
- Show each with its box cut out of the image, next to the text.
- Let a person confirm or correct those words only.
A blurry photo shows up as low-confidence words; retake only the pages that carry them. Measured on German and English pages; a sample page through the gallery shows how other scripts read.
Try image to text free on your own photo
Read your own photo, screenshot or scan free, or open the OCR demo gallery to see photos and scans read word by word.
Production use, high volume or your own server?
Private use and tests are free. For a company in production, a server of your own or a pipeline built on your pages, send the kind of page and the volume, and get a written offer, or a clear no when the fit is not there.
