Use Google Drive to convert Images to Text (OCR)

We may come across the need to convert images to text which should be editable, or we may need to convert some scanned copy into text, so that it can be edited in our regular editors. Actually, converting the scanned copy to text is done using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Software which may not come free. You need to spend some good amount of money to get them and convert images to text. Spending money to buy those OCR software only for single usage is not a good idea. You can convert images to text for free if you are a Google Drive user. Google Drive provides you the OCR technology and we make use of it to convert images to text.

Convert Image to Text using Google Drive

Before converting images to text, you need to see that there should be at least some text on the image, so that it can be converted to editable text. Images can be of png, jpg or any other format. Not only images, you can even use Google Drive to convert PDF files to text for free. Let us see steps which we need to follow to convert images to text and the same is applicable to convert PDF files to text.
Visit the Google Drive website and log in to it. If you do not have an account, it is advised to create and one and then log in to it.
Click on the New button and select File Upload to upload images file which you want to convert to text. Select the particular image file and it gets uploaded to Google Drive. In this example, I uploaded the screenshot of part of my article.

Once the files gets uploaded, right click on the image file and move towards Open with >> Google Docs.

Now, new tab opens with the image surrounded by the blue border and the corresponding editable text at the bottom. You can resize the blue border, based on the content which you want.
Make sure you got the text as you want. You can use options like In line text, Wrap text and Break text. Follow the process and be confident that you go the right text. You see that the text is editable.

Once you are sure about the conversion, remove the image from the tab, save the remaining text and close the tab. You can see the Google Document with the converted text next to the image file. Now, your image got converted to text and you can remove that image file as it is no more needed.

Once you are done with the conversion, you can edit it in toe Google Drive or you can download to your local PC and edit it in your editor.

Points to be remembered

• If your image file has less text to convert, then there might be little number of mistakes in the converted file. Make sure that you made the changes as your need before saving the converted document.
• If only certain part of the section is to be converted to text, then I suggest you to crop that part of the image and then convert it in to text, to reduce mistakes in the conversion.
• Images that need to be converted to text should be below 2 MB in size.
• For PDF Files only first 10 pages are converted to text. So, if you have bulk of PDF files to be converted to text, then follow the process for every 10 pages, but not all at once.

This is the best and easy way to convert images to text for free. If you have anything to add, please do share with us through comments.