If you have got a picture with a quotation and want to save the quotation text from it for later reference, you have to manually write down those text in a notepad file. But if you have a large number of image files to save the quotations from or the quotations are relatively longer, it will be a nightmare. At this point you can use a software to extract text or notes from a image file and save it as text only. Tools that can extract text from an image are powered by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. These tools support most image file formats like JPEG, BMP, PNG etc.

OCR technology converts images to computer understandable format. After the conversion, your computer will try to recognize the part of images that have text or other elements. After the recognition, it will read the text part and will extract that for your use.

All tools with OCR concept comes with a high price tag. Since it needs a lots of time, testing and development expenditures, companies are not willing to release these products as freewares. Two of those tools that can extract text from images are ABBYY FineReader, Time Snapper etc. You can also check for OCR plugins for your existing image editing tools, if available.

However, there is a free online OCR service to extract text from images online. It’s called Free-OCR. You can upload the images online and this online tool will tell you the written text on that image after leeching it from your image.