How to copy text from a screenshot or photo

Someone sends a screenshot of an address, an error message, a recipe; a book page you want to quote; a receipt for an expense report. Retyping is the slow way. OCR — optical character recognition — turns the pixels back into text.

Steps

1. Open Image to text and choose the language of the text. Mixed text with English words is handled automatically.
2. Drop the screenshot or photo. Recognition starts on its own.
3. Copy the text or download it as .txt.

Getting accurate results

• Crop to the text. Toolbars, wallpapers and hands in the photo confuse the engine. Use Crop image first if the screenshot has clutter.
• Straighten photos. OCR expects horizontal lines; a page photographed at an angle loses a lot of accuracy.
• Resolution matters. Text should be at least 20–30 pixels tall. Zoom in before taking a screenshot rather than enlarging afterwards.
• Screenshots beat photos. Rendered text is crisp and uniformly lit; photos rarely are.

PDFs

A PDF that was produced from Word already contains text — use PDF to text, it is instant and exact. A scanned PDF is just pictures: export a page with PDF to JPG and run it through Image to text.

What about handwriting?

The engine (Tesseract) is built for printed text. Neat block capitals sometimes work; cursive does not. For handwriting, the phone's built-in camera text selection is currently the better tool.