Snip OCR

With mobile devices getting increasingly more powerful with each iteration that comes to market, many smartphone users tend to stray away from the desktops, laptops and tablets in favor of the device that is always in their pocket anyway. As a result, in the search for a more convenient usage experience, sharing contents and text replies to different instant messaging platforms is done in the form of screenshots.

For those looking for a way to extract text from an image on the fly with little effort when writing reports, forwarding important company announcements or providing feedback on early access programs by reporting error codes and messages, a program known as Snip OCR may be a good choice considering its ease of use.

Once installed, using the program is as easy as double-clicking its automatically generated Start Menu shortcut to initiate the area selection tool and pick the portion of the screen that you wish to scan, bypassing any other graphical user interfaces or menus to execute its primary function.

After capturing the screenshot, a small terminal window flashes for a fraction of a second to let you know that the extracted text has been successfully copied to the clipboard for use in other apps.

Despite the program being quick and straightforward to use, there are some improvements that could be made to enhance the overall user experience, such as the implementation of a system tray icon for users to access it more easily rather than pinning the app to the desktop or taskbar, alongside the inclusion of a hotkey for users with keyboard-focused workflows to instantly capture text without the need for the cursor.

Users with multiple monitors may find themselves at a disadvantage considering the fact that the app’s selection mode can only be initiated on the main display, instead of automatically detecting the one in which the cursor currently resides. However, given the program’s open-source license, those with programming experience can make suggestions or fork the repository to create custom versions that fix these issues if needed.

If the manual picture to text conversion tools available online are not fast enough for your workflow, then Snip OCR’s fast-paced character recognition method resembling Microsoft’s own Snipping Tool may be the right utility for you.