PNG to Text
Free PNG OCR, transparency included. No account, no email.
Drop an image to read it
PNG — up to 3 MB. Your file is read on our servers in Frankfurt and deleted within the hour.
VisionParse converts PNG images to editable text free in your browser, including PNGs with transparent backgrounds.
We measured a PNG at 40% alpha and a PNG with a fully transparent background. Both read at 100% character accuracy. PNG is lossless, so unlike JPG no quality setting can affect the result — only resolution does.
What this tool does, in numbers.
- ACCURACY
A PNG with a fully transparent background read at 100% character accuracy.
- SPEED
VisionParse read a PNG invoice in 0.31 seconds on an 8-vCPU server.
- LIMIT
A 300-pixel-wide PNG read at 56.8% accuracy, against 100% at 550 pixels wide.
- LANGUAGES
VisionParse recognises 161 languages in PNG files, including Arabic, Sinhala and Tamil.
- ACCESS
The PNG to text tool requires no account, no email address and no payment card.
- RETENTION
VisionParse deletes free-tool PNG files one hour after conversion.
Where the 100% with alpha comes from.
Every figure on this page traces to a dated run on hardware we name. Nothing here is a vendor estimate.
Measured 2026-08-01
- Claim
- Transparent and semi-transparent PNGs both read at 100% character accuracy.
- Method
- VisionParse standard recognition tier, single-threaded. Full methodology.
- Sample
- One synthetic invoice saved as a PNG at 40% alpha, and as a PNG with the white background made fully transparent. Both read through the production pipeline and scored against published ground truth.
- Measured
2026-08-01on Contabo Cloud VPS 8 — 8 vCPU AMD EPYC, 24 GB RAM, Ubuntu 24.04.4- Limitations
- Transparency is flattened onto white before recognition, so light text intended for a dark background inverts badly under that assumption. A single synthetic document per variant is a small sample and is not a substitute for a corpus. These figures describe format behaviour, not general accuracy. A 500-document corpus run is scheduled and will supersede them.
- Contact
- VisionParse@senithu.lk
What this tool gets wrong
Transparency does not break recognition. A 40% alpha PNG and a fully transparent-background PNG both read at 100%. Transparent regions are flattened onto white before recognition.
Light text on transparency will fail. Because transparency is flattened onto white, pale text designed to sit on a dark background becomes invisible. Export that artwork on its intended background instead.
Lossless does not mean scale-proof. PNG has no quality setting to lose, but resolution still governs accuracy: 100% at 550 px wide, 56.8% at 300 px.
Three steps, no account.
Drop your PNG
Drag a screenshot, export or scan onto the workbench. Nothing leaves your device until you drop it.
Transparency is flattened
Transparent areas are composited onto white, then deskew and contrast normalisation run before recognition.
Take the text
Text appears with a confidence score. Copy it or download a .txt; the file is deleted within the hour.
What this tool accepts.
| Property | Free tool |
|---|---|
| Input format | PNG, including alpha channel |
| Output | Plain text, UTF-8 |
| Transparency handling | Flattened onto white before recognition |
| Recommended minimum width | 550 px |
| Maximum file size | 3 MB |
| Rate limit | 5 files per hour, per IP address |
| Languages | 161 |
| File retention | Deleted 1 hour after conversion |
| Processing location | Frankfurt, Germany |
When to use the API instead.
This page converts one file now. To convert files from your own software, the same engine runs over HTTP from Starter upward.
# same engine, from your code curl -X POST https://api.visionparse.app/v1/ocr \ -H "x-api-key: $VISIONPARSE_KEY" \ -F "file=@image.jpg" → 202 { "jobId": "c0df8e2c…" }
Use the API when
You convert more than a handful of files, convert on a schedule, or need results inside another system. Batch, webhooks and bounding boxes are API-only.
Frequently asked
Can VisionParse read a PNG with a transparent background?
Yes. A PNG at 40% alpha and a PNG with a fully transparent background both read at 100% character accuracy in our 2026-08-01 measurement. Transparent areas are flattened onto white first.
Why did my white-on-dark PNG come back empty?
Transparency is composited onto white before recognition, so pale text designed for a dark background disappears. Export the image on its intended background and try again.
Is PNG better than JPG for OCR?
Not meaningfully. PNG is lossless, but JPEG compression did not reduce accuracy in our tests even at quality 5. Resolution is what matters for both.
Is the PNG to text tool free?
Yes — 5 files an hour with no account, no email and no card. A free account raises the allowance to 100 pages a month.
Do you keep my PNG?
Free-tool files are deleted one hour after conversion. Account uploads are deleted after 30 days, and no customer file is ever used to train models.