Copy the text out of any screenshot, even a photo of a sign
Grab text off your screen in ten seconds with a tool you already have, then go further: searchable PDFs from scans with OCRmyPDF, and text from photos and screenshots with RapidOCR. Free, offline, and nothing gets uploaded.
- A drag-and-drop script that turns any picture into a text file
- Real accuracy figures for print, screenshots, angled photos and handwriting, so you know what to trust
- Any laptop from the last few years. 8GB of RAM is plenty
- About 500MB of free disk space
- uv installed. It's a small, official tool that installs Python apps cleanly. Level 0 shows you how, or see step 2.
The ten-second win: copy text off your screen
For one quick grab from your screen you don't need to install anything. Your computer can already do it.
On Windows 11press Windows + Shift + S, drag a box around the text, then click the notification to open the snip in Snipping Tool ↗. Click the Text actions button and choose Copy all text. Paste it anywhere with Ctrl + V. Microsoft says the recognition runs on your device.
On a Macopen a screenshot or photo in Preview and drag across the words to select them, then Cmd + C. This is Apple's Live Text, built into recent versions of macOS.
TipMicrosoft's free PowerToys adds a Text Extractor (press Windows + Shift + T) that reads text from anywhere on screen without opening the snip in another app. If you grab text off your screen often, it's quicker than the Snipping Tool route.TipThat covers the odd screenshot. The rest of this mission is for everything else: whole scanned PDFs, folders of photos, and pictures at an angle.