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Screenshot2Text

Screenshot2Text

Image to Text Without Uploading

Most image-to-text sites ask you to upload the file to their servers. That is convenient for a hosted model and a privacy problem if the screenshot contains a password reset code, customer data, an unpublished design, or a page from a personal document. Image to text with no upload means recognition runs on your device so the picture is not sent to our backend for OCR.

Screenshot2Text uses open-source OCR in this browser tab. After you drop a PNG, JPG, or another accepted file, recognition reads the pixels locally. We do not upload your image for OCR, and we do not store the picture or the extracted text on our servers. The first run may briefly fetch small recognition files to your device from a public CDN; those requests do not include your screenshot.

This is the right default for work screenshots, school notes, and anything you would hesitate to attach to a stranger's upload form. You still choose which file to open. No-upload here is a claim about recognition, not a claim that your browser never touches disk. Ads on the site, if shown, are separate from OCR: the pixels you drop stay in the page for the read.

The tradeoff is that a very large image is processed by your machine rather than a remote farm. For ordinary screenshots that is usually fine. Printed text and clear UI shots still work best. Handwriting remains unreliable; we do not advertise it as a strength. You can drop several images or a PDF, and everything is free. Use the drop zone below, or open the main free tool on the homepage to run the same no-upload converter.

The same policy is written on the privacy page.

Or open the main free tool

OCR runs in the browser. We don't upload your file for OCR.

Drop a screenshot, image, or PDF here

PNG, JPG, WEBP, GIF, BMP, or PDF · several files at once · tap to browse

Or paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V or ⌘V

Nothing to copy yet

Check it yourself in DevTools

You do not have to take our word for the no-upload claim. Any desktop browser can show every request this page makes. These steps are for Chrome and Edge. We ran them on screenshot2text.com on September 25, 2026, once with a new browser profile and again on a repeat visit, and the notes below describe what we saw.

1. Open this page. Press F12 (Cmd+Option+I on a Mac) and choose the Network tab. Tick Preserve log, then reload the page.

2. Look at what loads with the page. You will see the page itself and its scripts, styles, and font from screenshot2text.com, plus a few background requests for other pages on this site (/, /guides, /about, /contact, and /privacy) so links open faster. Ad scripts and frames load from Google ad domains such as pagead2.googlesyndication.com, googleads.g.doubleclick.net, and adtrafficquality.google.

3. Within a few seconds, before you pick a file, three recognition files load from cdn.jsdelivr.net: worker.min.js, tesseract-core-simd-lstm.wasm.js, and eng.traineddata.gz, the English language data. On a repeat visit the language data does not download again. The browser keeps it in IndexedDB, and you can see it under Application, then IndexedDB, then keyval-store.

4. Press the clear button in the Network toolbar so the list is empty. Now drop or paste an image and wait for the text.

5. Look at the new rows. In our runs the only entries during recognition were three rows whose URL starts with blob:https://screenshot2text.com/ followed by a random ID. A blob URL points at data that is already in this tab's memory, here your image and working copies of it. Chrome lists those reads in the Network tab, but nothing is sent over the network.

6. For a stricter check, type method:POST in the filter box. On our first visit and our repeat visit there were no POST requests at all, and no request carried a body. If an ad refreshes while you work you may see new ad rows. Click any row and open its Payload tab to see what it sent. Your image is not in it.

Recognition runs in a Web Worker inside the tab, using the files from step 3. That is why the image never needs to leave your device. How accurate that local read is, file type by file type, is covered in our OCR accuracy test.

FAQ

Do you upload my image for OCR?
No. Optical character recognition runs in the browser with open-source Tesseract. We do not send the file to our servers for recognition and we do not keep a copy of the image or the text. That is the whole point of this page: image to text without an upload step for the read.
What still leaves my device?
The page itself, the ads on it, and the small recognition files your browser fetches before the first read. Those requests ask for a named asset. They do not include your image or the text the tool extracted. Hosting logs and cookie details are spelled out on the privacy page.
Is no-upload OCR as accurate as a server?
For typical screenshots and printed pages it is in the same class as other Tesseract-based readers. We do not claim better handwriting or magic on blurry photos. The difference on this site is where the pixels are processed, not a hidden cloud model. Heavy jobs lean on your own processor rather than a remote farm.
Why choose no-upload over an upload converter?
Upload converters send your file to their servers, run recognition there, and send text back. That path is easy to meter and often means quotas, sign-in walls, or a temporary copy of your screenshot on someone else's disk. Here the engine downloads once and the work happens on your device, so there is no upload to sit through and no copy of your file in our storage.
Is no-upload image to text free?
Yes, and it stays free. No account, no trial, and no payment to read a file. Ads on the page cover hosting. Drop one image, several images, or a PDF on this page or on the homepage.