Common situations where OCR saves time
Screenshots are the most frequent OCR use case. Error messages, chat conversations, code snippets, social media posts — anything displayed on screen that you need as editable text rather than a picture.
Document photos come up when someone sends you a photo of a printed page instead of the actual document. Receipts, business cards, book pages, and whiteboard notes all fall into this category.
Scanned images — JPG or PNG files created by scanning paper documents — contain text visually but not as selectable characters. OCR converts the visual text into actual text you can copy, search, and edit.
- Screenshots of error messages or UI text
- Photos of whiteboards, signs, and printed pages
- Scanned documents saved as JPG or PNG
- Business cards and receipts photographed on phone
How to extract text on Irreva
Open the Image to Text (OCR) tool. Upload your image by dropping it in or clicking to browse. The tool accepts JPG, PNG, WebP, and other common image formats.
Select the language of the text in the image. This significantly improves accuracy — English OCR on an English document works far better than auto-detection on mixed content.
Click to run OCR. Tesseract.js processes the image in your browser using WebAssembly. Processing takes a few seconds for a single page. The extracted text appears in an output area where you can review, edit, and copy it.
Copy the text to your clipboard with one click, or download it as a plain text file. Your image was never uploaded to any server during this process.
Getting better OCR results
Crop the image to just the text region before running OCR. Extra background, photos, and graphics confuse the text detection stage. Use the Image Cropper to isolate the text area first.
Ensure the text is readable. If the image is blurry or low-resolution, OCR accuracy drops sharply. For phone photos, hold steady, ensure good lighting, and photograph straight-on rather than at an angle.
For screenshots, PNG format preserves text edges better than JPG compression. If you have the choice, capture or save as PNG before running OCR.
Review the output before using it. OCR makes mistakes — especially with numbers, punctuation, and similar-looking characters like 0/O or 1/l/I. A quick proofread catches most errors.
OCR output — what to do with extracted text
Copy and paste is the simplest workflow. Extract the text, copy it, and paste into an email, document, spreadsheet, or search bar.
For structured data like invoices or forms, paste into a spreadsheet and clean up the column alignment manually. OCR preserves line breaks but not table structure.
For longer documents, download the extracted text as a .txt file and open it in any text editor or word processor for further editing and formatting.
If you need the text in a searchable PDF, extract the text first, then combine it with the original image in a PDF editor that supports text layers.