case_study
TextQuill
Free on-device image-to-text OCR (Chrome extension)
Solo — product design, engineering, and release
- JavaScript
- Chrome MV3
- On-device OCR
- WebAssembly
problem
The problem
Getting text out of an image is a daily chore — a screenshot, a slide, a scanned invoice, a photo of a page — and almost every OCR tool solves it by uploading your image to a server. For anything sensitive (IDs, invoices, private documents) that is a non-starter, and even when it isn't, it's slow and gated behind accounts and quotas.
Doing it well in the browser meant two hard parts at once: running a real, multi-language OCR engine fully client-side without shipping the image anywhere, and making capture effortless from wherever the image actually is — a right-click, a dragged region, a full-page shot, the clipboard, a URL — instead of forcing everything through a single upload box.
approach
What I engineered
- Built a Manifest V3 extension that runs OCR on-device via a WebAssembly engine — no cloud upload, no account, no network round-trip for the image, so it works offline and keeps sensitive images private.
- Shipped nine capture paths so text can be grabbed wherever it lives: right-click an image, region select (Alt+Shift+S), visible or full-page capture, file upload, drag-and-drop, clipboard paste, an image URL, or a base64 data URL.
- Supported sixteen languages (English, Hindi, Nepali, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, and more) with Fast, Accurate, and Auto modes so the user can trade speed against precision per job.
- Added QR-code decoding, a local searchable history with starring, text-to-speech, one-click and auto-copy, dark mode, and .txt / .md export — the whole read-to-reuse loop kept in-browser.
- Kept it fully private and free: no accounts, no ads, no usage limits, and no data collection — history and settings persist locally, and images are processed and discarded on-device.
result
The result
A shipped, production-ready extension that turns any image or screen region into editable text in one action, without the image ever leaving the browser.
It's live and free on the Chrome Web Store, with its own site at textquill.app and a privacy policy. Install it below.
- 16
- OCR languages
- 9
- ways to capture
- 100% on-device
- images never leave your browser
Product facts for TextQuill, my own free Chrome extension (2026). No usage or adoption figures are claimed.Install on the Chrome Web Store ↗
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