Extract text from receipts, school notices, screenshots, invoices, and multilingual documents using OCR in your browser.
The AfroTools Image to Text tool uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to extract readable text from images. Upload a photo, screenshot, scanned document, or any image containing text, and the tool analyses the visual content to identify and extract all text characters. It supports multiple languages including English, French, Arabic, and Swahili — making it especially useful for multilingual African contexts where documents may contain text in several languages. Once the text is extracted, you can copy it to your clipboard with one click for pasting into documents, emails, or spreadsheets. The tool is powered by the Tesseract.js OCR engine, which runs entirely in your browser. This means your images and extracted text stay on your device with no server uploads required. Common use cases include digitising printed documents, extracting text from screenshots, converting scanned receipts to editable text, pulling data from infographics, and capturing text from photos of signs, menus, or business cards. The OCR accuracy is highest with clear, well-lit images and standard fonts.
The tool supports English, French, Arabic, and Swahili. Select the appropriate language before uploading your image for the best recognition accuracy.
Accuracy depends on image quality. Clear, high-resolution images with standard fonts produce excellent results. Handwritten text, low-resolution images, and unusual fonts may reduce accuracy. Well-lit photos with good contrast give the best outcomes.
This tool works with image files (JPG, PNG, WebP). For scanned PDFs, take a screenshot of the page or save the PDF page as an image first, then upload it to the OCR tool.
No. The OCR engine (Tesseract.js) runs entirely in your browser. Your images and extracted text are never uploaded to any server, making it safe for sensitive or confidential documents.
On the first use, the tool downloads the OCR language model to your browser (a one-time download). Subsequent extractions are faster because the model is cached locally in your browser.