How to Use ChatGPT for Extracting Text from Images: Best Prompts, Tips, and Use Cases

Best ChatGPT Prompts for Text Extraction

Here are 3 most useful examples of optimized prompts for various scenarios:

1. General Text Extraction:

• “Extract all text from this image, maintaining the original line breaks, formatting, and any special characters if possible.”

2. Structured Data Extraction:

• “Extract and organize text from this image into a clear structure, such as a table or bullet points, ensuring accuracy for numbers, dates, or lists.”

Try this prompt

3. Handwritten Text Extraction:

• “Identify and transcribe the handwritten text in this image, preserving as much accuracy as possible, and flag any unclear or illegible parts.”

Try this prompt

How to Optimize ChatGPT Image-to-Text Outputs

To get the most out of ChatGPT extraction, ensure your first prompt at the beginning of the chat is clear, specific, and provides context. Better avoid uplading your image from scratch. Use follow-up questions to refine results. 

Here are a few more prompt optimization tips:

1. Be Explicit About Formatting Needs: Specify whether text in the image is from tables, bullet points, or structured paragraphs.
2. Combine Tools for Accuracy: Use OCR tools like Tesseract, PDNob, or online services before engaging ChatGPT for interpretation.
3. Iterative Refinement: Use iterative prompts to gradually refine outputs, e.g., “This is great, but can you make it more concise?”

Common Use Cases

1. Academic Research: A student used ChatGPT with OCR to extract text from old manuscripts photos or screenshots. ChatGPT cleaned up the OCR errors and organized the content for a thesis.

2. Business Reports: A marketing analyst extracted competitor pricing data from product photos. ChatGPT helped reformat this data into a spreadsheet, highlighting trends.

3. Content Localization: A global e-commerce company extracted multilingual product descriptions from scanned brochures. ChatGPT translated and formatted these descriptions for their website.

4. Social Media Management: A content creator used ChatGPT to extract and reformat captions from screenshots of past posts, optimizing them for new campaigns.

Recommended Tools to Pair with ChatGPT

1. PDNob OCR Scanner: Extract text from images quickly and feed it into ChatGPT for analysis.
2. Google Lens: Free and highly accurate for text extraction tasks.
3. Tesseract OCR: Open-source software that integrates well with automation workflows.
4. DALL·E: Combine it with ChatGPT for extracting and analyzing visual and textual data.
5. Screenshot to code: as code is some sort of text and usually mixed with image formats

✨Have a look at GiPiTi's curated list of custom GPTs for images!