Text Recognition (OCR)

Overview

ScreenSnap Pro can read the text in an image and copy it to your clipboard, so you can paste it as real text. Text recognition runs on your computer: on Mac it uses the text recognition built into macOS, and on Windows the OCR engine built into Windows. Your images are not uploaded for it. You can use it in four places:

1. 1Recognize Text in the menu, for any area of the screen.
2. 2Copy Text (OCR) on the Quick Preview thumbnail.
3. 3Copy Text (OCR) on a pinned screenshot.
4. 4The OCR button in the editor, to select just the lines you need.

Copy text from any part of the screen

Recognize Text does not save a screenshot or show Quick Preview. It only puts the text on your clipboard. On Mac, a "No Text Found" notification tells you when there was no readable text in the area. On Windows no message appears, so paste to check the result.

1. 1Choose Recognize Text from the menu bar or tray menu, or press the shortcut you assigned to it.
2. 2Drag over the text you want, just like an area capture.
3. 3Release the mouse button. The recognized text is now on your clipboard.
4. 4Paste it anywhere with Cmd + V on Mac or Ctrl + V on Windows.

From Quick Preview or a pinned screenshot

Hover over the Quick Preview thumbnail or a pinned screenshot and click Copy Text (OCR). ScreenSnap Pro reads the whole screenshot and copies all of its text. The thumbnail shows a check mark and closes, and a pinned screenshot shows "Text Copied". If no text is found, the button turns red. These buttons appear on screenshots only, not on GIFs or videos. To get text from a video, pause it and use Recognize Text.

Select exactly the text you need in the editor

The editor's OCR mode is the best choice when a screenshot has a lot of text and you only need a few lines of it.

1. 1Open the screenshot in the editor and click OCR in the top bar. Its tooltip reads "Recognize text in editor".
2. 2All recognized text is copied right away, and each line is highlighted on the image.
3. 3Click a line to select it, or drag across several lines to select part of the text.
4. 4Press Cmd + C on Mac or Ctrl + C on Windows to copy only your selection. Cmd + A or Ctrl + A selects all lines.
5. 5Press Esc, click outside the image or click OCR again to leave text mode.

Languages

On Mac, the language is detected automatically, and macOS applies language correction to the result. On Windows, ScreenSnap Pro uses the Windows OCR engine with the languages in your Windows language list and falls back to English. To recognize another language on Windows, add it under Windows Settings > Time & Language > Language & region, then restart ScreenSnap Pro.

Troubleshooting

If Recognize Text is missing from the tray menu and thumbnails have no Copy Text (OCR) button, text recognition isn't available on this Windows PC. When a language pack is missing, Settings > Shortcuts shows "Not available: Windows has no OCR language pack installed." Add a language under Windows Settings > Time & Language > Language & region, then restart ScreenSnap Pro. On computers where company policy restricts PowerShell, text recognition can't run, so ask your IT team for help.