Image Text OCR

OCR stands for optical character recognition: a picture that is just pixels to the computer becomes real, selectable, copyable text. It sounds like magic but it is exactly what you need when an important document exists only as a photo or scan and you want to reuse the numbers or sentences - without retyping everything by hand.

Image Text OCR is tailored to German everyday life. It recognises German text including umlauts and ß, but also handles English documents and mixed text. You pick the language to match the document and recognition adapts. Especially with German technical terms and bureaucratic language, the right language setting makes a big difference to the hit rate.

Before the text is recognised the tool prepares the image. A crookedly photographed scan is straightened, the contrast raised and it is converted to grayscale so the letters stand out cleanly from the background. This preprocessing is why photographed documents and slightly yellowed copies still become readable - without it, OCR on phone photos often works only so-so.

So you do not have to trust the result blindly, there is a confidence analysis. It shows how sure recognition is at individual spots. Where confidence is low, a checking glance pays off - say a smudged digit in an amount or a hard-to-read name. That way you know what to watch for instead of being unpleasantly surprised later.

Typical cases are quickly told: take the IBAN from a photographed invoice, digitise the text of a tax assessment for your own files, turn a book page or business card into editable text, or make a screenshot with locked, unselectable text copyable after all. Wherever text is stuck as an image, OCR pulls it out.

Processing runs server-side so even larger scans and difficult originals are recognised reliably. Your images are processed only for the recognition and are not stored permanently. You get the result as clean text you can copy, edit further or move into your records.