How to copy text from an image or screenshot on Windows

Windows 11: Snipping Tool's text actions

Snipping Tool has recognised text in captures since its 2023 update, so on Windows 11 the quickest free route is already installed. It works on anything you can see: a photo, a scanned PDF, a video frame, an app that will not let you select its text. Recent versions also put a Text extractor button in the capture bar, which copies the text in the area you drag without opening the editor at all.

1. Press Win+Shift+S and drag a rectangle around the text. On current Windows 11 builds, the Print Screen key opens the same selection.
2. Click the notification that appears to open the capture in Snipping Tool.
3. Click Text actions in the toolbar. Every line it recognised becomes selectable.
4. Click Copy all text, or select just the lines you need and press Ctrl+C.

Text actions also offers Quick redact, which hides email addresses and phone numbers in the capture, and Microsoft says the recognition runs entirely on your PC. What it copies is plain text: a table loses its columns and code loses its indentation.

Windows 10 or 11: PowerToys Text Extractor

Microsoft's free PowerToys add a system-wide text-recognition shortcut that skips the editor entirely, which makes it the fastest free option when you only want the words.

1. Install PowerToys from the Microsoft Store or from GitHub, open its settings and make sure Text Extractor is on.
2. Press Win+Shift+T and drag a box over the text on screen.
3. The recognised text is now on your clipboard. Paste it wherever you need it.

Text Extractor uses the text recognition built into Windows, so it can only read languages whose recognition pack is installed (Settings → Time & language → Language & region). Like Snipping Tool, it returns plain text without tables or layout.

Already have the image file? OneNote or Google Lens

If the picture is a file rather than something on screen, paste it into a page in OneNote for Microsoft 365, right-click it and choose Copy Text from Picture. For an image on a web page, Chrome's Google Lens does the same: right-click the image, choose Search with Google Lens, then select the text inside the image to copy it. Both are free; Lens sends the image to Google to read it.

When plain text recognition is not enough

Classic OCR turns pixels into a stream of characters. That is fine for a sentence and painful for a table, a block of code, a receipt with two columns, or a page in a script your PC has no recognition pack for. Small type, low contrast and stylised fonts make it worse, and it cannot tell you what it was unsure about.

An AI reader looks at the image the way you do. ScreenFeel's Read text lens returns the text verbatim, in reading order, with tables as tables, lists as lists and code in a fenced block, and it marks a character it genuinely cannot make out as [?] instead of guessing. To data turns a table or chart into a CSV you can paste into Excel, and Translate reads and translates in one step.

The one-key way with ScreenFeel

1. Install ScreenFeel from the Microsoft Store and let it answer the Print Screen key. One switch in its settings hands the key back to Windows.
2. Press Print Screen and drag around the text — in any app, including video players, remote desktops and apps that block copying.
3. Choose Read text. Copy the result with one click; the capture and the text stay in your local library, searchable later.

Capturing is free and never leaves your PC. Read text runs on the lightest tier, the cheapest run in the free monthly allowance, and sends that one image once, to a model that keeps nothing.

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