Japanese text from image, with furigana and meanings

Ways to read Japanese from a screenshot

Each approach suits a different job. Pick the one that matches what you need back.

How to read Japanese text in a screenshot

1. Add the image. Click the drop area, drag a file onto it, or press Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac) to paste a screenshot. PNG, JPEG and WebP work.
2. Let the browser shrink it. The image is scaled down to 1600 px on its longest side and re-encoded before upload, so large screenshots stay under the 4 MB limit.
3. Run the scan. Press the scan button. Results usually appear within a few seconds. One scan is taken from your three free scans for the day.
4. Read and check. Read the original lines, switch furigana and romaji, and look through the word table and grammar notes. Compare anything odd with the picture.
5. Save the words. Press Copy as flashcards to put a tab-separated list on your clipboard, or Download .tsv to save it as a file.

What you get from one scan

A scan returns six things in one result:

• The Japanese text, line by line in reading order.
• The same text with furigana written over the kanji. A switch adds romaji.
• A word table with the surface form, the hiragana reading, romaji, part of speech and a short English meaning.
• One to three grammar notes that name the pattern and explain it in plain English.
• A natural English translation, one line per sentence.
• A flashcard export you can import into a spaced repetition app such as Anki.

Everything on screen is plain text that you can select and copy.

Japanese screenshot to furigana: what works best

Clear horizontal text on a plain background gives the best results. Dialogue boxes in games, subtitles and printed pages usually read well. Vertical manga text, handwriting, decorative title fonts and text over busy artwork are harder, so crop to the part you want to read before you scan.

The scan is done by an AI vision model, so it can misread a character or give a reading that does not fit the context. Treat the result as a study aid and check it against the picture. If you only need the text itself, the Japanese OCR page returns plain lines.

Read Japanese from a screenshot without a scan

If you already have the text, you do not need a scan. Paste it into the furigana converter, the kanji to hiragana converter or the romaji converter. They run in your browser and have no daily limit. The sentence breakdown splits a sentence into words for free and only uses a scan when you ask for explanations.

Limits and privacy

Each visitor gets 3 free scans per day. The count resets at 00:00 UTC. The image goes to an AI model provider through OpenRouter to produce the result and is not stored by this site. Read the privacy page for exactly what is logged and the pricing page for what is planned.