You have text trapped in an image. A screenshot, a slide, a scanned page, a photo of a receipt. You need it as real, editable text, and retyping it is not a plan. Here are the four honest ways to extract text from an image in Chrome, and where each one stops being worth it.
Option 1: Retype it
Free, always available, and fine for a phone number. For anything longer it is slow and error-prone, and it does not scale past a paragraph. Skip it the moment there is more than a line or two.
Option 2: A cloud OCR website
Upload the image to a site, wait, copy the result back. It works, but it means sending your image to someone else's server. For a meme that is fine. For an invoice, an ID, a contract, or an internal screenshot, you have just handed a private document to a third party, often behind an account and a daily quota.
Option 3: Google Lens / Docs
Google Lens and "open with Google Docs" both do OCR reasonably well. The catch is the workflow: you leave what you are doing, round-trip through another Google surface, and the image still travels to a server. Good in a pinch, clumsy as a daily habit.
Option 4: An on-device extension in the browser
This is the one that survives daily use. A Chrome extension that runs the OCR locally keeps the image in the browser and puts the text one action away. I use TextQuill, which I built, so weigh the recommendation with that in mind:
- Grab text from anywhere — right-click an image, select a screen region with
Alt+Shift+S, capture the full page, upload a file, drag and drop, paste from the clipboard, or point it at an image URL. - On-device — the OCR runs locally, so the image never leaves your browser. No upload, no account, no quota.
- 16 languages — English, Hindi, Nepali, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic and more, with Fast, Accurate, and Auto modes.
- The whole loop — searchable local history, one-click copy, text-to-speech, and
.txt/.mdexport.
Which should you pick?
Extract text once a month and Google Lens is fine. Do it several times a day, or ever with anything sensitive, and the math changes: the tool that keeps the image on your machine and the text one keystroke away is the only one you will not quietly abandon. If privacy is the deciding factor, that is its own post: private OCR without uploading your images. If you mostly work from screenshots, see screenshot to text.
TextQuill is free on the Chrome Web Store if you want the on-device version of this.