Do you need to access the text from a photo or image? Perhaps you are working on a project where you need to quickly scan through images and search for specific text.
Or maybe your job requires that you capture text from images of manuals and books so that they can be read digitally. Reading text from images and transcribing it manually is not an interesting activity for many, no matter if they are students or researchers.
Google Docs is a fantastic tool for working collaboratively on documents. It has a variety of useful features such as version control, different sharing options and the ability to track changes.
It’s also free and available online, meaning that you don’t need to download any software or be connected to your company’s intranet in order to use it.
Extract text online using Google Docs
With that in mind, it makes sense to use Google Docs whenever possible. If you want to extract text from images using Google Docs I have the perfect solution for you, a powerful add-on named FileDrop.
Google Docs add-ons are a great way to enhance its features and capabilities and with FileDrop you can greatly increase your productivity in Google Sheets and Google Docs.
In this blog post, we’ll look at how you can use Google Docs and FileDrop for extracting text from images using its built-in optical character recognition (OCR) functionality.
Extract text from images or PDF
Open Google Docs and start FileDrop. If you don’t have the FileDrop please install it from here.
Step 1
Once FileDrop is open, drag and drop your file in the upload area. If the file is already in your Drive you can search or open it from the Drive tab.
Step 2
Hover over the file and you will see the TXT with a magnifying glass icon in green color. Click on it and in a few seconds the text area will open with the extracted text.
Step 3
The recognized text in the image will be displayed in a text area. You can insert the text in your Google Doc or Sheet or you can copy it and use anywhere else.
Extract text from images video tutorial
Conclusion
With the OCR feature of FileDrop you can extract words from images/photos, jpg or png, pdf. It supports all languages of Google Translate, even Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi or Korean.
You can add a picture with handwritten letters and it will extract the text from that as well. Using FileDrop to extract text from images is a no-brainer.
Now on our website you can extract text from images of PDF files with our free online OCR tool plus a ton of other free PDF editing tools.
Frequently asked questions
Can I extract text from images in different languages?
Yes, you can extract text from images that are in different languages: English, German, French, Spanish or more. It can even extract text containing Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi or Korean.
What formats does it support?
You can extract words from images/pictures/photos in jpg, jpeg, png or PDF.
Can I extract text from a screenshot?
Yes, you can. A screenshot is just like any image, and the OCR technology in FileDrop will be able to extract text from a screenshot.
Can I extract handwritten text from images?
Yes, with FileDrop you can extract text from handwritten text. Unless the image is blurry or the text is really bad then it should work great. Partial letters won’t show up as text.
