Downloading or clicking an image is the easiest way to capture text from paper documents with ease on your phone or computer.
Imagine you have a pile of handwritten notes you need to organize for a project or a pile of receipts you want to digitize to better track your expenses.
While saving text as an image is convenient, you cannot easily modify, copy, or edit the text in an image. You’ll typically extract the text from the image to get a digital version that you can then easily edit on your computer or mobile device.
Copying or extracting text from an image is a fairly easy process today, with tools that can even recognize handwriting, complex table data, and checkboxes. Such tools leverage machine learning algorithms and computer vision techniques to read/capture text from images.
In this article, you will learn how to easily extract text from image files in seconds.
Let’s look at 4 quick methods of converting an image to editable text using Adobe, Microsoft Word, Google Drive and Nanonets.
By first converting an image to a PDF file, you can copy text from it very easily in some cases.
- Choose a suitable image to PDF converter from Adobe Acrobat online – e.g. the JPG to PDF converter (supported image file types include JPG, PNG, BMP and more).
- Click “Choose File” to upload your image or drag and drop it to the converter.
- Click to open the downloaded PDF file.
You can now copy the text from the PDF.
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In some cases, the converted PDF may turn out to be flat and you may not be able to copy the text easily! You may need to use PDF to text converters to extract the text in this case.
Convert image to text in Microsoft Word
Converting an image to text in Microsoft Word also includes an intermediate step of converting the file to PDF format.
- Add or drop the image to a Word document.
- Click File >> Save As >> and select the PDF option – this will save the file as a PDF.
- Now again, click on File >> Open >> and select the PDF file you just saved in the previous step to open it in a new Word file.
Microsoft Word will automatically detect the text in the PDF and display it as editable text in the new Word document created in step 3.
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Although this method works well, the text formatting may be modified – especially if your original image contained complex table data or checkboxes for example.
Google Drive allows you to open any image (or PDF) file in Google Doc, rendering the text in editable Doc format.
- Upload your image to Google Drive.
- Right click on the file >> Open with >> Google Docs.
It may take some time, but eventually you will receive a Google Doc with the original image file and the extracted text in an editable format.
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As with the previous method, text formatting can be lost when converting an image to a Google Doc this way – especially if your original image contained columns or tables for example.
OCR software such as Nanonets uses advanced optical character recognition capabilities to extract text from images/pictures and documents.
This goes beyond the basic OCR that is part of the methods covered above. It can extract text from documents and images with high accuracy – even from those with complex data formatting. Such OCR software can not only preserve the original formatting of the text in the image, but also extract only the structured data you need.
Here’s how to convert image to text using Nanonets:
- Automatically upload or ingest images from emails, cloud storage services, support tickets and almost any data source.
- Export text or data accurately with advanced AI-powered OCR exporters that don’t rely on predefined templates.
- Export clean structured data as XLS, CSV or XML etc. or push data directly into your CRM, WMS or database.
Why convert images to text?
Extracting text from images is a fairly common requirement – both for personal and business use cases. Here are some reasons why converting an image document to text can be beneficial:
- Textual data in digital form is more convenient to store, edit, organize, search or even copy.
- Copying text from images is a much more efficient alternative to manual data entry – especially when dealing with images with very complex table text or handwritten data.
In addition, when you use a software (such as OCR) to extract image to text, you can process many images at once or in batches, saving a lot of time and effort.
How to ensure accurate text conversion from an image
Here are some things to consider when choosing the best image-to-text method for you and minimizing any possible re-processing:
- The picture or image must be clear with legible text – blurry or dark images with tiny non-standard text fonts may affect accuracy
- Try to keep a standard orientation for images – skewed images may not affect the accuracy of text extraction
- The file size of the images should not be too large or too small – eg. Google Drive recommends ideal image files smaller than 2 MB
- If preserving the original text formatting from the image is vital, then choose the right method for you – not every image to text conversion method can guarantee this!
- Always check the extracted text – or at least a sample – for accuracy. While simple text extraction is fairly straightforward, errors can occur with images of more complex documents (invoices, bank statements, contracts, etc.).