Taking a photo or clicking an image is the easiest way to capture text from paper documents conveniently on your phone or computer.
Imagine having a bunch of handwritten notes that you need to organize for a project, or a bunch of receipts that you want to digitize to better track your expenses.
While it is convenient to store text as an image, it is not easy to modify, copy, or edit text from an image. Typically, text is extracted from the image to obtain a digital version that can then be easily edited on a computer or mobile device.
Copying or extracting text from an image is a fairly straightforward process these days, with tools that can even recognize handwriting, complex tabular data, and checkboxes. These 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 a few seconds.
Let's look at four quick methods to convert an image to editable text using Adobe, Microsoft Word, Google Drive, and Nanonets.
By first converting an image to a PDF file, in some cases you will be able to copy text from it quite easily.
- Select a suitable Adobe Acrobat image to PDF converter online, for example, JPG to PDF converter (supported image file types include JPG, PNG, BMP and more).
- Click “Select a file” to upload your image, or drag and drop it into the converter.
- Click to open the downloaded PDF file.
You can now copy the text from the PDF.
In some cases, the converted PDF may turn out to be flat and you may not be able to copy the text easily. In that case, you may need to use PDF to text converters to extract the text.
Convert an image to text in Microsoft Word
Converting an image to text in Microsoft Word also involves an intermediate step of converting the file to PDF format.
- Add or drop the image into 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.
While this method works well, the formatting of the text can change, especially if the initial image contained complex tabular data or check boxes, for example.
Google Drive allows you to open any image (or PDF) file in Google Doc, thus converting the text into an editable Doc format.
- Upload your image to Google Drive.
- Right click on the file >> Open with >> Google Docs.
It may take a while, but you will eventually get a Google Doc with the original image file and the extracted text in an editable format.
As with the previous method, some text formatting may be lost when converting an image to a Google Doc this way, especially if the initial image contained columns or tables, for example.
OCR software, such as Nanonets, uses advanced optical character recognition capabilities to extract text from images and documents.
This goes beyond the basic OCR that is part of the methods mentioned above. It can extract text from documents and images quite accurately, even those with complex data formatting. This OCR software can not only maintain the original formatting of the text in the image, but it can also extract only the structured data that you need.
Here's how you can convert images to text using Nanonets:
- Automatically upload or ingest images from emails, cloud storage services, support tickets, and virtually any data source.
- Accurately extract text or data with advanced ai-powered OCR extractors that don't rely on predefined templates.
- Export clean structured data as XLS, CSV or XML etc. or send the data directly to your CRM, WMS or database.
Why convert images to text?
Extracting text from images is a fairly common requirement, both for personal and commercial use. Here are a few reasons why converting an image document to text can be beneficial:
- Textual data in digital format 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 a lot of complex tabular text or handwritten data.
In addition, by using software (such as OCR) for image to text extraction, you can process multiple images simultaneously or in batches, thus saving a lot of time and effort.
How to ensure accurate conversion of text from an image
Here are a few things to keep in mind when selecting the image to text extraction method that is best for you and minimizing any potential rework:
- The image or photograph must be clear and have legible text – blurry or dark images with small, non-standard text fonts may affect accuracy.
- Try to maintain a standard orientation for images – skewed images can affect the accuracy of text extraction.
- The file size of images should not be too large or too small; for example, Google Drive ideally recommends image files smaller than 2 MB.
- If it is crucial to maintain the original text formatting of the image, select the method that is appropriate for you – not all image to text conversion methods can guarantee this!
- Always review 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.).