Free tool to read characters from photos and screenshots and convert them into text (OCR)

§1. I sympathize with this problem: The futility of manually inputting and copying the text in images one by one.

"I want to use text from paper materials, textbook photos, or screenshots of my PC screen as text data, but I get frustrated because I can't copy and paste..."

While staring at the image, I type and copy each letter on the keyboard, but my eyes get tired and it takes time to check for typos...''

“I want to compile only the important parts of the whiteboard photos I took at a work meeting into minutes, but manually converting them into text is extremely tedious.”

Manually retyping text information in images is a very inefficient and wasteful task in modern business and learning. Manual input errors cannot be prevented, and a lot of time is wasted on monotonous typing tasks.

§2. Explanation of the cause: Why can't I copy and paste images? How OCR works and the traps of the cloud

Image files (JPEG, PNG, etc.) are not characters to a computer, but simply a collection of "color pixels (colored dots)." Therefore, it is not possible to select and copy the range as is.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a technology that analyzes this pixel arrangement, matches it with the shape of human characters, and reconstructs it into text data.

Japanese is difficult to recognize because it contains a mixture of kanji, hiragana, and katakana and has a large number of strokes, but the following problems further reduce recognition accuracy.

• Low image quality/out of focus: If the outline of the character is ambiguous, the character recognition will be incorrect.
• Low contrast: If the border between the background and text color is thin, the text will not be recognized.
• Image distortion: If a photo is taken from an angle, the letters will be distorted and difficult to read.

Also, when using a general "free OCR service", you need to upload the image to the server once.

Sending important photo data such as customer business cards, confidential contracts, and password-protected instructions to the cloud carries a high risk of information leaks and violations of company policies.

§3. Solve with tools: Securely transcribe without sending externally with ZeroTools

"I want to instantly convert the Japanese in an image into text without leaking information to the outside world..."

Our site's Image character recognition/offline OCR extraction tool achieves both security and practicality.

This tool uses a technology called WebAssembly (WASM) to run an open source high-performance OCR engine (Tesseract.js) directly within your browser (local environment).

Solution steps

1. Open Image character recognition/offline OCR extraction tool.

2. Load the image you want to convert into text by dragging and dropping (this process is done within the PC, so it will be reflected immediately).

3. Select the language you want to recognize (Japanese or English).

4. Click the "Start character recognition" button.

5. The analysis will run, extract the characters from the image, and display them as text in the text field on the right.

6. Click "Copy" to save to the clipboard or "Save as TXT file" to download as a text file.

If you correct the tilt and distortion of the image in advance using a smartphone cropping tool, etc., and then load it, it is possible to convert it into text with almost 100% recognition accuracy. Free yourself from the pain of handwriting and visual typing and experience safe and comfortable digital work.