Frequently Asked Questions

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is technology that reads text inside images and converts it into editable, searchable characters. It is widely used for digitizing documents, reading screenshots, and automating data entry.

Yes, completely free. There is no signup, no credit card, and no watermarks. AI OCR is limited to 10 uses per visitor per day; browser OCR remains available after that.

Yes. Extract Text uses cloud AI OCR first. If that request fails or returns no text, the tool automatically falls back to Tesseract.js in your browser. The AI provider is named in the Privacy Policy.

Yes. Each visitor can use AI OCR up to 10 times per day (UTC). When the limit is reached, Extract Text still works using browser-based Tesseract.js OCR.

For AI OCR, yes temporarily: the image is sent through our server to a Google AI service to extract text. We do not permanently store your images. If AI OCR fails, the tool falls back to Tesseract.js in your browser for that attempt. See the Privacy Policy for the exact provider name.

The tool automatically switches to the browser-based Tesseract.js OCR pipeline (with preprocessing) so you can still extract text.

You can upload common image formats including PNG, JPG, JPEG, WEBP, and GIF. For best results, use clear, high-contrast images with readable text.

The tool supports English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Hindi. Select the language that matches your document before extracting.

Clean Mode applies smart layout reconstruction for full-page screenshots and automatically focuses on centered modals or dialogs in UI captures. It filters noisy regions like sidebars when possible. Turn it off for raw OCR output on simple images.

Accuracy depends on image quality, font clarity, language, and lighting. Printed text on clean scans typically scores highest. Handwriting, blurry photos, and decorative fonts are harder. Always proofread the output for important use cases.

You may use text you extract from your own images for personal or commercial purposes, provided you have the right to use the original image content. We do not claim ownership of your input or output.

Yes. The tool works in modern mobile browsers. You can upload photos taken with your phone camera or from your gallery.

AI OCR usually responds in a few seconds. If the tool falls back to browser OCR, Tesseract.js may download language model files on first use; later browser extractions in the same session are usually faster.

No. Extracted text is shown in your browser session until you copy, download, or clear the page. We do not keep a permanent archive of your OCR results.

Yes. We use Google AdSense to help cover hosting and development costs. Ads are kept unobtrusive. See our Privacy Policy for cookie and advertising details.

Email admin@elangodev.com or use the Contact page. We read every message about questions, feedback, or bug reports.