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How to copy text from a photo or screenshot (and get clean results)

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You have a screenshot of an error message, a photo of a recipe card, or a page from a book, and you want the words as text you can paste. Phones can often do this already, and when they can't, a browser tool can. Here is what works, and how to get clean text instead of a mess.

The fastest options you probably already have

  • iPhone / iPad: open the photo, press and hold on the text (Live Text), then Copy.
  • Android: Google Lens from the Photos app, "Text", then Copy.
  • Windows 11: Snipping Tool has a "Text actions" button after you take a snip.

If you are on a work laptop where you can't install anything, on a shared computer, or the image is sensitive (bank letter, medical form), a browser tool that runs on your device is the better fit.

In the browser, without uploading

FixMint's image to text downloads a small text-recognition model into the browser the first time you use it, then reads the image locally. The picture is never sent to a server, and after the first load it works offline. If your text is in a PDF that was created digitally rather than scanned, PDF to text is faster and exact.

Getting clean results

Text recognition fails for boring reasons. Fix those first:

  1. Crop to the text. Logos, shadows and table borders turn into stray characters. Crop tightly.
  2. Straighten it. A photo taken at an angle reads worse. Rotate so lines are level.
  3. Fix dim photos. Brighten a dark kitchen-light photo before reading it.
  4. Expect handwriting to be hit and miss. Printed text is reliable; neat block capitals are often fine; joined-up handwriting usually isn't.

Tidy the output

OCR output from a book page has a line break at the end of every printed line. Paste it into fix pasted text to join the lines back into paragraphs, and use remove hidden characters if the text behaves strangely in a form field.

Then read it once against the original. OCR confuses 0 and O, 1 and l, and rn and m; check every number before you rely on it.

All the tools linked here are part of FixMint: 83 free on-device tools for photo, PDF, text and number chores, with no account and no uploads.

Written with the help of an AI assistant for Yunus Emre Vurgun, who makes FixMint.