Supported source formats
JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, and WebP. Drop any of those, get a UTF-8 .txt back with whatever readable text the OCR engine could find.
Why OCR an image?
- Type out a photo. Snap a picture of a printed page; get back the text without re-typing it.
- Pull from a screenshot. Code, recipes, addresses, error messages — anything you've screenshotted.
- Receipts and signs. Quick capture for expenses, addresses, transit info.
- Accessibility. Image-only content becomes readable by screen readers.
How it works
- Open the converter. Go to the Formatly converter — no signup required.
- Drop your image. Drag and drop one or more images into the upload box (up to five files, 20 MB each). JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP, TIFF, and BMP are all supported.
- Pick OCR (Extract Text) from the dropdown. The image is sent to Google Cloud Vision, which handles Latin-script European languages out of the box.
- Convert and download the .txt. Click Convert; a download link appears for a plain UTF-8 text file containing the recognized text in approximate reading order.
What works well
- Clean, well-lit photos of printed text.
- Screenshots of code, articles, or UI text.
- Document scans at 300+ DPI.
- Latin-script European languages by default.
What doesn't
- Heavily stylized text (logos, decorative fonts, low contrast).
- Handwritten notes — partial recognition only.
- Skewed photos taken at an angle — straighten first if you can.
- Very low-resolution images — there's no recovering detail that isn't there.
Getting better results
- Crop tightly. Less background = better signal.
- Straighten the page. A 5° tilt is fine; a 30° tilt isn't.
- Use even lighting. Shadows confuse the recognizer.
- Higher resolution helps up to a point — going from 100 DPI to 300 DPI is a huge accuracy jump; 300 to 600 is marginal.
FAQ
Does the image-to-text OCR work on screenshots? Yes, and screenshots are usually the easiest case. The text is rendered cleanly at high contrast without skew, lens distortion, or lighting variation, so accuracy on a typical desktop or mobile screenshot is near-perfect for Latin-script languages.
Does the OCR preserve layout, tables, or columns? No — the output is plain UTF-8 text in approximate reading order. Multi-column layouts are read column-by-column. For tables, each cell typically lands on its own line. If you need structured output (a CSV, a spreadsheet, a Word doc with the original layout), this isn't the right tool — extract the text here, then format it separately.
What languages does the OCR support? Latin-script European languages work out of the box (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, etc.). CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and right-to-left scripts (Arabic, Hebrew) are available on request — contact us if you need them enabled.
Can the OCR read handwriting? Partially. Clear block-printed handwriting often comes through; cursive and casual handwriting yield mixed results with mistakes scattered throughout. If you need reliable text, use a printed source — handwriting is the hardest case for any current OCR system.
What happens to my image after the OCR runs? The uploaded image and the resulting text are auto-deleted from our servers after one hour. We don't store or analyze your content beyond completing the OCR pass. See Security for details.
Related
- PDF → Text (OCR) → same OCR, PDF source
- HEIC → JPG → convert iPhone photos before OCR
- JPG → PNG → clean up the source image first
- PNG → JPG → if a system requires JPG
- How OCR works →
- How to extract text from a screenshot →
- Why scanned PDFs look bad (and how to fix them) →