Translate a picture to English: 7 free tools compared
I compared 7 free tools that translate a picture to English. Every tool here reads the words off a picture and gives you a translation. The differences come after that. How many pictures do you get for free? Do you need an account? What happens to your picture once you upload it? And does the English come back drawn onto the image, or as a plain block of text?
I went through seven of them on 1 October 2026 and wrote down only what each company says on its own help pages, pricing pages and privacy policy. When a company doesn't publish something, I say so. Prices and limits change, so the date matters.
One of the seven is AnyFileKit. That's this site. It goes first, and its section covers what it gets wrong as well as what it does.
AnyFileKit: the picture stays on your computer
The Image Translator reads the text in your picture inside your browser tab. The text recognition engine (OCR) downloads into the page the first time you use it. After that, only the words it finds are sent off to be translated. The picture itself is never uploaded.
The English is painted back over the spot each line of text came from, on a patch filled with the colour around it. You download a PNG at the same size as the original, or read the original and the translation side by side as a list.
Free is 5 pages a day. No account, no watermark. If you need more, it's a one-time US$9 for 1,500 pages over 30 days, not a subscription.
Now the limits. It can only read six kinds of text from a picture: English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian. Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Thai can't be read yet, though you can translate into them, out of 19 languages in all. You also pick the source language yourself before you start, and if you pick the wrong one you get nonsense.
Handwriting doesn't work. Neither does text at an angle, text curving around a bottle, or a blurry photo. On a flat screenshot or a white page the patch behind the English is hard to see; on a photo or a gradient, you will see it. And the original fonts, colours and bold are gone.
Google Translate: no published limits, and you upload the picture
Google Translate on the web has an Images tab. You upload a picture or paste one in, and Google's help page says you can then copy the translated text or download the translated image. It takes JPG, JPEG, PNG and WebP files.
That is about all Google publishes. The page shows no free limit, no paid plan and no maximum file size. Google's Lens page says it covers more than 100 languages, and the help page warns that "small, unclear, or stylized text may result in lower accuracy."
Google's privacy help doesn't say how long a picture uploaded here is kept. On a phone, the Translate app and Google Lens do the same job through the camera, and the app can translate camera text offline once you download a language pack.
DeepL: account required, 3 MB per image
DeepL translates images in two places. On the website and the desktop apps it is part of file translation, still labelled beta. DeepL's help says it pulls the text out of the image, translates it and puts it back into the image, and you download the result. In the phone apps, the translation is laid over the original text.
You need a DeepL account for file translation. Images can be PNG or JPG up to 3 MB, on every plan including free. DeepL also says that while image translation is in beta, it doesn't count toward your monthly file limit, which on the free plan is one file a month. Paid plans start at €7.49 a month for Individual.
Free and paid users get different privacy terms. For free users, DeepL's privacy policy says content may be used "for a limited period of time to train and improve our neural networks." For paid plans, it says data isn't used to train models outside your account.
Two smaller notes from DeepL's help. It recommends images at 300 DPI. And the phone app can't read Greek or Cyrillic text as the source.
Yandex Translate: 5 MB, and it didn't ask me to sign in
Yandex's image translator is at translate.yandex.com/en/ocr. The upload box takes JPG, PNG, GIF and other formats up to 5 MB, and the page didn't ask me to sign in. You can download the result or open it as text.
Yandex doesn't publish a daily limit for this, how many languages it can read from images, or whether the translation is drawn back onto the picture. Its Terms of Use, dated 18 June 2025, say nothing about how long uploaded images are kept.
OpenL: free text, and two pages that disagree about images
OpenL's image translator page says you can translate the text in an image for free every day without signing up. It also says you can get the translation back as an image "a limited number of times" for free. But its pricing page lists image-to-image translation as not included on the free plan. The two pages don't agree, and I can't tell you which one is right.
Free uploads can be up to 10 MB, in JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF or SVG. OpenL says it supports more than 100 languages, and its stronger text recognition for handwriting is paid only. Paid plans, billed yearly, are Starter at $8.9 a month for 3 image translations a day, Pro at $9.9 for 10 a day and Ultimate at $29.9 for 30 a day.
OpenL's privacy policy was last updated on 2 April 2024. It doesn't mention uploaded files at all.
ImageTranslate.AI: 2 images a day, kept indefinitely by default
ImageTranslate.AI gives you back a translated image that keeps the original layout. Its FAQ says you get 2 free translations a day without logging in. A free account gets 20 credits a day at 10 credits per image. So that's also 2 images.
Files can be up to 10 MB, in JPG, PNG or WebP, and free use is for personal purposes only. It says it supports more than 130 languages in both directions. Paid plans billed yearly start at $8.3 a month for Starter.
Its privacy policy, updated 6 February 2026, says: "By default, your data is retained indefinitely." The same policy says uploaded content isn't used to train AI models, and that content may be sent to outside AI providers to do the translation.
Photo Translator: free with ads, images deleted after processing
Photo Translator, at phototranslator.net, is free, needs no account and shows ads. It takes PNG, JPG and WebP, says it covers more than 80 languages, and lets you copy the translated text or download a translated image. It doesn't publish a daily limit, a paid plan or a file size limit.
Its privacy policy, updated 8 April 2026, says images are processed in real time and then permanently discarded. It doesn't name the services that do the reading and the translating. The site also warns that cursive, blurry or faded handwriting can come out wrong.
If you only care about one thing
The picture is private, like a payslip, a medical letter or an ID. AnyFileKit is the only tool here that doesn't upload the picture; it sends only the text it reads. Every other tool on this list has you upload the image.
The text is Japanese or Korean. AnyFileKit can't read those from a picture yet. Google says Lens covers more than 100 languages.
You want the English drawn back onto the picture, for free. AnyFileKit does that for 5 pages a day and ImageTranslate.AI for 2 images a day. Google's help says you can download the translated image.
You don't want an account. AnyFileKit, Yandex, OpenL for text, ImageTranslate.AI for 2 a day and Photo Translator work without one. DeepL needs one. Google's help doesn't say.
You care how long your picture is kept. ImageTranslate.AI keeps it indefinitely by default. Photo Translator says it deletes it after processing. Google, Yandex and OpenL don't say for this feature.
Two tools I left out
Microsoft Translator's phone app translates text in photos, and Microsoft's own language table marks 39 of its 136 languages as working with images. But I couldn't find its free limits, how long it keeps pictures, or whether it draws the translation onto the image.
Canva has an image translation feature too. Its help pages didn't open from where I checked, so I left it out rather than repeat what other blogs say about it.