Snipping OCR : Process content from anywhere on your desktop using an OCR engine and obtain the results in seconds, with this lightweight tray utility
There are plenty of desktop applications and online services that offer OCR capabilities, enabling you to extract text from images and non-searchable documents. However, these aren’t always as convenient as some users would like.Snipping OCR is an open-source program that allows you to select text from anywhere on your screen and run it through an OCR engine in no time. It is very unobtrusive and does not need to be installed before use.
Easily accessible at any time
Once you have launched the application, you will find it in the system tray. When you need to process some text, simply double-click the system tray icon or use the Ctrl+Win+C hotkey to bring up the selection box.Unfortunately, since the Windows Creators update, the Ctrl+Win+C key combination is used to enable or disable color filters. It would be great if the hotkey were customizable, but this is sadly not the case.
Process content from your desktop or the clipboard
After selecting an area of your screen, the application runs the image through the Tesseract OCR engine in an attempt to detect and extract text. The results were not very impressive during our tests, but you may have better luck depending on the source material.In addition to processing a picture captured from your desktop, the program is also capable of grabbing image content from the clipboard. If you enable the monitoring function, any copied image will be processed automatically.
Unobtrusive and easy-to-use OCR tool
All in all, Snipping OCR can be very helpful if you are in need of a quick way to extract text directly from your desktop. It wasn’t particularly accurate during our tests, but it is certainly convenient and very easy to use.The program is in need of an update, however, as the default hotkey can no longer be used if you have upgraded to the latest version of Windows 10.
Windows 10 64 bit / Windows 10 / Windows 8 64 bit / Windows 8 / Windows 7 64 bit / Windows 7 / Windows Vista 64 bit / Windows Vista / Windows XP 64 bit / Windows XP
Snipping OCR runs on
Windows 10/11
and is available under the
OpenSource under LGPL
license
— the installer is 25.5 MB.
We’ve catalogued it under
Word Processing.
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