How to copy text from a screenshot or image on Windows

On Windows 11, press Win+Shift+S and snip the area with the text, click the notification to open the snip in Snipping Tool, click Text actions in the toolbar, then select the text you want and copy it, or click Copy all text. The recognition runs on your PC. Microsoft’s free PowerToys adds Text Extractor (Win+Shift+T), which copies text straight from a box you draw on screen and also runs on Windows 10. hypershot’s OCR capture, Ctrl+Shift+O, does the same one-drag move inside your screenshot app, with a freeze for moving content and the option to run OCR on captures you’ve already taken.

The built-in way: Snipping Tool

On Windows 11:

1. Press Win+Shift+S (or PrtScn, which opens the same overlay on recent versions of Windows 11) and snip the text.
2. Click the notification that appears to open the snip in Snipping Tool.
3. Click Text actions in the toolbar. Snipping Tool runs OCR on the image and highlights the text it found.
4. Select the lines you want and press Ctrl+C, or click Copy all text.

The same panel has Quick redact, which blacks out email addresses and phone numbers it finds in the snip. That’s a nice touch.

Recent versions of Snipping Tool add a Text extractor button to the capture bar, rolled out to Windows Insiders in 2025, which copies text from a region without opening a snip first. If you see it when you press Win+Shift+S, use it; it saves two steps.

On Windows 10, the older Snipping Tool doesn’t have Text actions.

The other built-in-ish way: PowerToys Text Extractor

PowerToys is a free set of utilities from Microsoft (Windows 11, or Windows 10 version 2004 or newer). Turn on Text Extractor, press Win+Shift+T, drag a box, and the text is on your clipboard. It uses the Windows OCR engine, so it reads the languages whose OCR packs are installed on your PC. Microsoft’s own docs say to proofread the output, which is fair advice for any OCR.

If you already run PowerToys, it’s a good option. It does one job, and does it well.

With hypershot: OCR capture

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+O (or choose OCR Capture from the tray menu).
2. Drag a box around the text.
3. Let go. The recognized text is on your clipboard.

What hypershot adds on top of the one-drag basics:

• Freeze the screen. Press Space while selecting and the screen holds still, so you can box text in a playing video or a scrolling log.
• OCR on an earlier capture. Open a hypershot capture in the editor, set the artboard crop around the text, and click OCR in the toolbar. The text goes to your clipboard.
• Remove line breaks. Settings → OCR → Remove line breaks joins wrapped lines, so a paragraph pastes as a paragraph.
• Check the result. By default the recognized text also opens in your text editor (pick which one, or turn it off, in Settings → OCR).
• On your PC. hypershot uses the Windows OCR APIs locally, on the pixels you selected. Nothing is uploaded.

It also lives in the same app as your screenshots, annotations and redaction, and works the same way on Mac. The OCR capture docs have the full settings.

Tips for clean results

• Select tight. Crop close to the text you want.
• Contrast matters. Dark text on a light background reads best; small, blurry or low-contrast text reads worse in every OCR tool.
• Proofread codes and numbers. O and 0, l and 1 can still swap in some fonts.

For more on how hypershot’s OCR works, see convert images to text.

Why won’t Windows OCR read my language?

The Windows OCR engine reads a language only when its OCR language pack is installed. Microsoft’s Text Extractor docs show how to check which packs you have and add more.

How do I do this on a Mac?

Open the image in Preview and use Live Text. See how to copy text from a screenshot or image on Mac.