Most free OCR tools on the internet share a common problem: they upload your files to a remote server, process them there, and return the results — often with a watermark, a usage limit, or both. That's a significant privacy risk for sensitive documents like contracts, medical records, or personal IDs.
totxt.org was built around a different philosophy: your files are handled securely and never kept for a second longer than necessary.
How It Works
When you drop a file into the converter, here's what happens:
- The file is uploaded over a TLS 1.3-encrypted connection.
- Our backend OCR engine processes the document — no watermarks, no signup wall, no waiting in a queue.
- The extracted text is returned to your browser, ready to copy, download, or export in the format you need.
- The uploaded file and all intermediate data are permanently deleted from our servers as soon as the task completes.
Key Features
- 100% free, no signup required — Open the page and start using it immediately.
- 10 concurrent tasks — Work on up to ten documents at once without waiting in a queue.
- 100+ languages — Covers the vast majority of world languages out of the box.
- 30+ output formats — Export the extracted text as plain text, DOCX, PDF, or whichever format suits your workflow.
- Mask tool preprocessing — Black out sensitive regions (names, addresses, card numbers) in the browser before the file is sent, so private details never reach our servers in the first place.
- Files auto-delete — Uploaded files and intermediate results are destroyed the moment processing completes.
- Fast results — Most documents are processed in seconds.
Privacy by Design
Privacy should not be a premium feature. Whether you're a journalist handling source documents, a lawyer reviewing contracts, or just someone extracting text from a photo, you shouldn't have to wonder where your data ends up.
That's why totxt.org combines three layers of protection:
- Encryption in transit — TLS 1.3 is enforced for every upload.
- Redaction before upload — The built-in mask tool lets you hide sensitive regions directly on the image before it ever leaves your device.
- Deletion after use — Files are permanently removed from our servers the moment your task completes.
Built on Proven Foundations
Our OCR engine is built on Tesseract, the industry-standard open-source OCR engine maintained by a global community of contributors. We believe in building on proven, auditable open-source foundations rather than reinventing the wheel.
What's Next
We are working on:
- More structured output formats (JSON, CSV)
- Table detection and extraction
- Improved accuracy for handwriting and low-quality scans
- Additional language packs