How to Copy Text from a Screenshot (Without Retyping It)

You screenshot an error message, a tweet, a slide, or a paragraph in an app that won’t let you select anything — and now you need that text somewhere else. Retyping it is slow and error-prone. Here’s the faster way.

The 10-second workflow

1. Screenshot to your clipboard.
   • Windows: press Win + Shift + S and drag over the text.
   • macOS: press ⌘ + Ctrl + Shift + 4 (the extra Ctrl copies to the clipboard instead of saving a file).
   • Linux: most environments use Print Screen or a snipping tool with a “copy” option.
2. Open the screenshot to text tool and press Ctrl + V (or ⌘ + V) anywhere on the page.
3. Click “Copy text”. Done — the recognized text is on your clipboard.

There’s no step where you save a file, create an account, or wait for an upload. The OCR runs inside your browser, so the screenshot never leaves your machine.

Grabbed the whole desktop by accident? Don’t recapture. On the preview, drag a box around the text (or click a block) and extract just that region.

From a phone

Phones make this even shorter: recent iOS and Android can select text directly in a screenshot from the share sheet or photo viewer. When that fails — stylized fonts, busy backgrounds, text inside graphics — send the screenshot to your computer, or open the tool in your phone’s browser and upload it there.

What kind of screenshots work best?

OCR loves screenshots. Unlike photos, they’re pixel-perfect: no blur, no perspective, no shadows. Accuracy on standard UI text is usually excellent. A few tips for tricky cases:

• Zoom in before you shoot. If the text is 10px tall on your screen, bump the page zoom to 150% first. More pixels per letter means fewer mistakes.
• Grab more context. Cropping too tightly can cut off ascenders and descenders. Leave a little padding around the text.
• Dark mode is fine. Light-on-dark text recognizes just as well as dark-on-light.
• Language. Printed English, German, French, Japanese and Korean (plus Chinese) are the default. Mixed UI chrome — English buttons on a Japanese dialog — is fine.

If the result has mid-sentence line breaks, toggle Clean up text. The raw output stays one click away.

Why this beats “type it out”

Beyond speed, OCR gets the details right: long error codes, URLs, hashes and IDs are exactly where humans make transcription mistakes. Copying a 0x8007000E error code or a 40-character API key by eye is asking for a typo — and a typo in a search query means zero useful results.

What about sensitive screenshots?

Screenshots often contain exactly the things you shouldn’t paste into random websites: private chats, account numbers, internal dashboards. Most online OCR services upload your image to their servers for processing.

The tools on this site work differently: the OCR engine is downloaded to your browser and runs there. You can watch the network tab in your browser’s developer tools while extracting — no image data goes out. That’s the whole reason this site exists; more in our privacy explanation.

Try it

Take a screenshot of this paragraph right now, then paste it here — you’ll have it back as text in a couple of seconds.