Imagine the following situation: you have just finished an image in which you have exposed the work that you are going to present to a client in the morning. It has been perfect and you are proud of what you have done. You save everything in the format and delete the entire file you've been working on. And when you check again after a few hours ... Horror! You have a huge misspelling. And what are you doing now? Do you do it all over again? It can pass an image to text to retouch it?
Fortunately for you, yes, the truth is that you could have the solution to your problems if you know that an image can be converted to text, but how do you do that? Are there programs for all types of images? Do you have to do it manually or can you use automatic programs? All these doubts are what we are going to solve for you below.
How to convert image to text with Google Drive
The first of the solutions that we are going to give you goes through something that we use regularly: Google. Specifically, we are going to need Google Drive to be able to operate, since it is this tool that will be in charge of converting the image file to text. But how do you do it?
Once you have Google Drive open on your computer, you have to upload the image you want to convert to Drive. Next, with the right button, you have to click Open / Google Documents.
What will this do? Well what Google will automatically convert the image to text, exactly to a Google document. Of course, you must be prepared because sometimes it does not come out the same as in the image. That is, you will lose some formatting, especially the lists, columns, footnotes or at the end of the page, tables, etc. All this cannot be "saved" but the font size, type, bold, italics and even line breaks will keep them.
That means that, even if you convert it, then you will have to dedicate some time to that document to be able to put it back as it was before, or to use it in order to reproduce what you had done in the image editing program.
Convert image to text with OneNote
Another option that you can try, especially if the only thing that interests you about the image is the text that it has in it, is through OneNote. We are talking about Microsoft OneNote and, believe it or not, it rivals Google Drive. Now, what is there to do?
First of all, you need open OneNote to hit Insert and upload the images you want to convert to text. Once you have them, you must point to the image and click the right mouse button. Check the Copy text from image option.
Now, almost automatically, you will have the text on the clipboard, and all you have to do is paste it into a notepad or Word, whichever is more comfortable for you.
As you have seen, this option will only serve to obtain the text itself, but nothing else. Also, depending on where you paste it, you could end up losing its format.
Can you convert images to texts with applications?
If you are one of those who continuously use your mobile or tablet and you are looking for solutions using these devices, you should know that yes, also through applications you can find some solutions to your problem of converting image to text.
In fact, there are several, although the ones we recommend are the following:
Google Lens
Again from the Google company, it will allow you display the image, paint the text so that it is copied, and then paste it into the text document what you want. As simple as that!
The best thing about Google Lens is that it is also capable of translating texts, which gives you more play to use it even with images with text from another language. Of course, be careful with the translation because sometimes they are wrong.
Microsoft Office Lens
This application goes a little further than the previous one from Google. And it is that, in this case, when we show the image, it will automatically record which are the text parts and it will copy all of them generating a Word document (or also from OneNote or PDF) so that you have all the conversion of the image to text.
PDF scanner
Imagine that you have taken a photo of a letter with a very long text and now you need that text and you don't want to transcribe it. Well don't worry because you don't have to. The only thing you will need is this application.
What are you doing? Well once you scan the image, will convert the photo into a text document. It is even capable of adding a digital signature to the document it generates. Of course, check after the conversion because sometimes it can miss some letters.
Image to text online
The last of the options that we give you to transfer image to text is through the Internet. And there are many web pages where you can upload the image and its tools are responsible for reading it and transcribing all the text to a text document (usually Word or PDF) so that you can download it and thus operate with it.
Of course, as we always tell you, this option is not for everyone. And if the document is quite important and you need to maintain control over it and make sure that the information in it is not accessible to unauthorized people, it is not the best thing to upload it to the Internet. Although most websites have a strict security policy, depending on which cases, it is not advisable (for example with private customer data).
But if there is no problem with that, some of the pages that we can recommend are:
- online2pdf.com
- Onlineocr.net
- smallseotools.com
- ocr2edit.com
- online-convert.com
The operation of all these pages is very similar. To do this, you have to upload the image to their servers so that the tool can get to work and in a matter of seconds or minutes will offer you a text file (TXT, Word, ODT or PDF) so that you can download it. If you also need to convert these documents to other formats on most pages you will also be able to find a way to do it.