Free OCR Tool to Extract Text from Images (Japanese Supported)
Extract text from PNG or JPEG images using the Tesseract OCR engine. Handles mixed Japanese and English content. Pull characters from screenshots, photos, scanned documents, business cards, and receipts and turn them into copyable text. No sign-up required, completely free.
What is OCR (Optical Character Recognition)?
OCR uses machine-learning models to identify text in images and convert it to editable text. It bridges the gap between images and text for tasks like digitizing phone-photographed documents, copying text from screenshots, and converting paper materials.
This tool uses Tesseract (version 5), an open-source OCR engine backed by Google. With the built-in Japanese training data (`tesseract-ocr-jpn`), it accurately reads hiragana, katakana, kanji, and alphanumerics mixed together.
How to use
1. Drag and drop a PNG / JPG / JPEG image (up to 20 MB on the Free plan) 2. OCR runs automatically and the extracted text appears below 3. Copy the text or download it as a .txt / .md file
Processing takes about 3–10 seconds per page depending on text volume and image resolution.
Tips for better accuracy
· **Resolution**: 300 DPI+ scans or close-up smartphone photos are ideal · **Contrast**: White background with black text gives the best results; colored backgrounds or text over photos reduce accuracy · **Skew correction**: Tilted documents lower recognition rates — use a smartphone app to auto-straighten before uploading · **Handwriting**: Tesseract is optimized for printed text and struggles with handwriting. Consider a dedicated AI OCR service (e.g., Google Vision) for handwritten content
Combining with other tools
OCR output gains more value when combined with other tools.
Example workflow: photograph a whiteboard → OCR to text → AI Meeting Notes to produce structured meeting minutes. Or: scan a paper document → OCR → AI Document Formatter to reformat into a report.
This tool focuses purely on text extraction; downstream formatting is handled by other tools in the suite.