OCR Guide
Free Online OCR Guide — Complete
Free online OCR turns a document photo, scanned invoice, or image PDF into selectable text — essential for search, copy-paste, or rework. WebFileTools offers two levels: 100% in-browser OCR (Tesseract.js, no upload) for images, and server OCR for heavy multi-page PDFs with automatic deletion after processing.
When to use OCR?
Digitizing signed contracts, receipts, business cards, presentation screenshots, or PDFs exported from a scanner without a text layer. Quality depends on contrast, resolution (300 DPI recommended for print), and document language. For French and English, Tesseract offers a solid speed/accuracy balance on clean documents.
Cloud OCR vs WebFileTools
| Criteria | Smallpdf / Adobe online | WebFileTools |
|---|---|---|
| Image OCR (JPG, PNG) | Cloud upload | 100% browser — file never sent |
| Large PDF OCR | US/EU cloud server | Quebec server, auto-delete |
| Sensitive data (health, HR) | Third-party policy to review | Local option recommended + privacy guide |
| Structured Markdown export | Rare on free tier | OCR to Markdown available |
| Price | Quotas / subscription | Free, privacy badge per tool |
Pick the right WebFileTools tool
For a photo or screenshot: online OCR (local, private). For a long scanned PDF: PDF to text on the server. To reuse content in a wiki or LLM: OCR to Markdown. Improve contrast first with compress image if the scan is blurry or too heavy.
Start free OCR — 100% local →