How to Extract Text From an Image: A Complete 2026 Guide

Why extract text from images?

Whether you are a student copying notes from a whiteboard, a journalist transcribing posters in the field, or a small business owner digitising receipts — manually retyping text is slow, error-prone and expensive.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) reads pixels and outputs editable text in seconds. ImageToTextSA is built on Tesseract, a battle-tested open-source OCR engine that runs entirely inside your browser — your image never leaves your device.

Step-by-step

1. Upload or drag your image into the dropzone. We accept JPG, PNG, WEBP and HEIC up to 10 MB.
2. Pick the language of the text. We support English, Afrikaans, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Setswana and Shona.
3. Click Extract Text. Processing takes 3–15 seconds depending on file size.
4. Edit, copy, or download the result as plain TXT or formatted DOCX.

Tips for the cleanest result

• Crop the image to just the text region before uploading.
• Use 300+ DPI scans for documents.
• Avoid shadows and glare on receipts.
• Straighten skewed photos in your phone's photo app first.

Is it really free?

Yes. ImageToTextSA runs on a free in-browser engine. No accounts, no watermarks, no daily limits.