How to convert a JPG to text
- Choose the language of the text, then drop your JPG files into the box or choose them.
- Each photo is read in turn. The first time takes a little longer while the reader downloads.
- Copy the text, or download it as a TXT file to open in Word, Google Docs or any editor.
Why JPG files need OCR
A JPG is a picture made of pixels, even when it shows a page of text. Your computer doesn’t know that the dark shapes are letters, so you can’t select or search them. OCR (optical character recognition) looks at those shapes and works out the letters, which turns the picture back into text you can copy, edit and search.
Most JPGs with text come from phone cameras, scanners and screenshots saved as JPG. Screenshots give the best results because the letters are perfectly sharp. Phone photos come next, as long as the page is flat and in focus.
Getting clean text from a JPG
Crop to the part you need with the crop tool first. Less background means fewer stray marks read as letters. If the text is light on a dark background, invert the image before reading it.
iPhone photos are often saved as HEIC rather than JPG. This tool reads HEIC too, so you don’t need to convert them first. For text in a PDF, use PDF to text, which reads the text layer directly when there is one.