How to Extract Text from an Image or Scanned PDF (Free OCR, Offline Options)

A scanned document is just a picture of text. You can't search it, copy from it or edit it until something reads the letters back out — that's OCR (optical character recognition).

The good news is that for most everyday jobs you don't need to pay for anything or upload documents to a stranger's server. Here are the options, from quickest to most powerful.

For a screenshot or anything on screen

Snipping Tool — Text Actions (Windows 11)

1. Press Win + Shift + S, or open Snipping Tool, and capture the area.
2. In the Snipping Tool window, click the Text actions button in the toolbar.
3. Click Copy all text, or select specific lines and copy them.

It can also redact emails and phone numbers before you share the screenshot. It runs locally.

PowerToys Text Extractor

Microsoft's free PowerToys add-on includes Text Extractor:

1. Install PowerToys from the Microsoft Store and enable Text Extractor.
2. Press Win + Shift + T and drag a box around any text on screen — in a video, a locked PDF, an image or an app.
3. The text is copied to your clipboard.

Great for grabbing a serial number from a photo or an error message from a dialog you can't select.

For a photo or image file

The free image to text tool runs the Tesseract OCR engine in your browser. Drop in a photo of a page, a receipt or a screenshot, pick the language (14 are available), and get editable text to copy or download. The image stays on your device.

OneNote can also do this: paste an image into a page, right-click it and choose Copy Text from Picture.

For a scanned PDF

This is where free tools run out. A scanned PDF is a stack of page images, and you usually want one of two things:

1. The text out — to paste into an email or document.
2. A searchable PDF — the same document, looking identical, but with an invisible text layer so you can search it with Ctrl+F and copy from it.

Your options:

• Screenshot individual pages and use one of the tools above. Fine for one or two pages.
• Microsoft Word can open PDFs (File → Open) and convert them into editable documents. It works best on text-based PDFs; results on scans vary, and complex layouts shift around.
• Google Docs (right-click a PDF in Google Drive → Open with → Google Docs) performs OCR, but uploads the document to your Google account.
• Online OCR sites upload your document too, often with page limits and watermarks.
• Desktop OCR software makes searchable PDFs locally — the right choice for contracts, IDs, medical records, invoices or anything confidential.

Getting accurate results

OCR quality depends much more on the input than on the software:

Handwriting is a separate problem. Standard OCR engines, including all the free options here, are built for printed text.

Keeping sensitive documents private

It's worth pausing before dragging a passport scan, bank statement or signed contract into a random "free OCR" website. Even reputable services keep uploaded files for hours, and you're trusting their security with your data.

Every method in this guide except Google Docs and online OCR sites runs on your own device.

Batch OCR and searchable PDFs, offline

If you digitise paperwork regularly — an accountant's receipts, a law office's archive, years of household papers — I built Private OCR Studio for Windows to do it locally. It turns scanned PDFs and images into searchable PDFs that keep the original look, exports Word, text and CSV, rebuilds tables into spreadsheets, straightens and cleans messy scans, and processes a whole folder in one queue. It runs on the CPU (no GPU needed), with no account, upload or subscription.

For the occasional page, the free options above are all you need.