Screenshot to Text

Why screenshots read so well

Text on a screen is drawn with perfectly sharp, evenly lit, perfectly straight letters, which is the ideal input for OCR. In our tests, screenshots of ordinary interface text, including dark mode and light gray text on pale backgrounds, came back with every character correct. Mistakes mostly appear with very small text, tiny icons mixed into a line, or heavily stylized fonts in images and games.

If you screenshot a high-resolution display, the text is already large and crisp. On a standard display small interface text may be only 8 to 10 pixels tall; it is enlarged automatically before reading, which helps.

Handy uses

• Error messages: copy the exact wording to search for a fix or send to support.
• Chats and posts shared as images: quote them without retyping.
• Slides from a video call or a recorded lecture: turn them into notes.
• Codes and serial numbers: copy them exactly, then double-check characters that look alike, such as O and 0 or l and 1.
• Text in images on websites: banners and infographics that you can’t select.

Lines or paragraphs

With “Keep line breaks” on, the text follows the lines in the screenshot, which suits code, lists and messages. Turn it off when you are copying a paragraph from an article or a slide: wrapped lines are joined into flowing text and words split by a hyphen at the end of a line are put back together, so it pastes neatly into a document or email.

Capturing only what you need

A full-screen capture includes menus, toolbars and other windows, and the engine dutifully reads all of it. Selecting just the area you need with your system’s region capture gives cleaner results: on Windows, Win+Shift+S lets you drag a rectangle; on a Mac, Cmd+Shift+4 does the same. On phones, take the screenshot and crop it in your gallery, or here with Crop Image, before extracting the text.

Screenshots stay private

Screenshots often capture more than you intend: notifications, open tabs, names in a chat. Nothing is uploaded here. The text recognition runs in your browser, and the engine and language files are downloaded once from our own domain. If you want to share the screenshot itself, you can hide parts of it first with Object Remover or Blur Faces.

Saving the result

Each screenshot gives a plain .txt file named after the original image. With several screenshots, download them together as a ZIP, or press Copy all text to get everything in one block, separated by each file’s name, which is convenient for pasting into notes. For more on keeping your images safe online, see our guide to online image tools.