Copy the text out of a screenshot
Paste a screenshot straight from the clipboard and take the words away as text — an error message you cannot select, a table in an app, a chat, a slide. It is read on your own device.
- Processed on your device
- No upload, no waiting
- No signup, no watermark
How it works
Paste it in
Press Ctrl+V — or Cmd+V on a Mac — with the screenshot on your clipboard. Dropping a saved file works just as well.
Read it
Screen text is small, so the picture is enlarged to the size the reader works best at first. Nothing is straightened or re-lit, because a screenshot is already square.
Copy the text
One button puts it back on your clipboard, laid out as it was on screen or joined into paragraphs.
Frequently asked questions
Can I paste instead of choosing a file?
Yes, and it is the point of this page. Take your screenshot as you normally would — Cmd+Shift+4 on a Mac, Win+Shift+S on Windows, which both put the picture on the clipboard — then press Ctrl+V or Cmd+V here. Nothing needs saving to disk first.
Why is this different from the image page?
Because a screenshot is not a photograph and conditioning it as though it were makes it worse. There is no skew to remove and no uneven lighting to level, so both are switched off. What screen text does need is enlarging: at normal size a letter is about ten pixels tall, roughly a third of what the reader wants, so the picture is scaled up before it is read.
Is my screenshot uploaded?
No. Recognition runs in your browser. The reader and the language pack come from this site the first time you use a language; the picture itself never leaves the device, so it works with the Wi-Fi off and nothing is stored anywhere.
Will it keep the table I screenshotted?
A table with visible ruling lines is found and read cell by cell, and comes back as tab-separated rows that paste straight into a spreadsheet. A table laid out with spacing alone and no rules is read as columns of text in reading order, which usually survives the paste but is not guaranteed.
It misread text on a dark background. Why?
Dark mode inverts the contrast the reader expects. It is tried both ways round and usually gets there, but a dark theme with low-contrast grey text is genuinely hard. If a screenshot comes back poorly, taking it again in a light theme is the fastest fix.
Which languages can it read?
Over 120, including English, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The script is read from the picture itself; where several languages share a script — Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari — your browser's own language settles it, and you can always change it.
Can it read the text in a video?
From a still, yes — pause it, screenshot the frame and paste that. Subtitles burned into a video are usually large and high-contrast, so they come out well. There is no reading of the video itself here.
Good to know: Very small text — below about eight pixels a letter — has too little detail to enlarge back into shape, so a screenshot taken on a high-resolution display reads better than the same thing shrunk down. Text drawn over a busy image, and light grey on white, will come out patchy. The result is plain text: no typefaces, colours or formatting.