Snipping OCR

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.

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+Shift+C hotkey to bring up the selection box.

It would be nice if users had an easy way to change the default hotkey, although it should be suitable for most.

After selecting an area of your screen, the application runs the image through the SpaceOCR or Tesseract engine in an attempt to detect and extract text. The results were fairly accurate during our tests, but the quality of the source material is important.

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.

Snipping OCR can be very helpful if you are in need of a quick way to extract text directly from your desktop. It did a decent job during our tests, and it is certainly convenient and very easy to use. However, it has to be said that it isn't the most modern-looking application out there