Free Online License Plate OCR
Read a License Plate From a Photo
Need to use License Plate OCR right now?
Reading a license plate number from a photo — for a parking record, an incident note, a personal log — is a specialized OCR task where the goal is a clean alphanumeric string, not full prose text. This tool runs the recognition (via Tesseract, compiled to WebAssembly, entirely in your browser) then strips the result down to letters and numbers only, matching a typical plate's format.
Original
Drop an image, or click to browse
Processed locally in your browser — never uploaded
Recognizes text and strips it down to letters and numbers only, matching a plate's typical format. Works best on a cropped, well-lit, front-on photo of just the plate — accuracy drops on angled shots or a photo with lots of surrounding vehicle visible.
Features
- Privacy-first processing with automatic deletion
- Real-time, instant results
- 100% free, no sign-up required
- Works on desktop, tablet, and mobile
- No installation needed
Who uses this tool?
About License Plate OCR
Reading a license plate number from a photo — for a parking record, an incident note, a personal log — is a specialized OCR task where the goal is a clean alphanumeric string, not full prose text. This tool runs the recognition (via Tesseract, compiled to WebAssembly, entirely in your browser) then strips the result down to letters and numbers only, matching a typical plate's format.
The cleanup step removes spaces, dashes, and any other recognized characters that aren't letters or digits, since plates are conventionally rendered as a continuous alphanumeric code — this produces a cleaner result than raw OCR output would, which often includes stray punctuation or misread border characters.
Accuracy depends heavily on the photo: a cropped, front-on, well-lit shot of just the plate recognizes far more reliably than a wider photo including the vehicle, since surrounding visual clutter (bumpers, reflections, background) can confuse the recognition.
Everything runs locally — the photo and recognized plate content never leave your browser, relevant for anything involving vehicle identification you'd rather not send to a third-party server.
How it works
- Upload a photo of the plate. A cropped, front-on, well-lit shot works best.
- Recognition runs locally. Text is extracted and cleaned to letters and numbers only.
- Copy the plate number. Review against the photo — angled shots reduce accuracy.
Examples
Reading a plate from a parking photo
Input
cropped, front-on plate photo
Output
cleaned alphanumeric plate text