A little over a year ago, I told you about a Chrome extension that allowed you to copy text onto an image: Project Naphtha. Today, the tool I'm going to talk to you about is a little different since it's a free online service that allows you to extract text from an image using text recognition (OCR: Optical Character Recognition) and which is simply called FreeOCR. It's not new, far from it, but it's a tool to know about!
FreeOCR is therefore a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to recover text from JPG, GIF, TIFF BMP or even PDF files (but only the first page).
This service works in nearly 30 languages including French (but also English, Spanish, German, etc.) and can handle texts with multiple columns.
The only restriction is that your image must not be larger than 2MB, must not be more than 5 pixels high or wide, and you are limited to 000 uses per hour (which is not very restrictive).
To try, go to FreeOCR, choose a file on your computer, select the language in which your text is written to improve recognition, fill in the captcha (the anti-robot test) and press “Send File”.
Count a few seconds, and that's it...
Here is an example that I made with an image containing text (an extract from the home page of Byothe.fr) and below the result extracted by Free OCR:
Note that recognition does not work with handwriting.
Article updated on January 5, 2025 by Byothe
