Has it ever happened that you are watching a presentation on YouTube and want to quickly grab text from the slideshow? Or, say you have a scanned PDF of an obscure book and want to extract text from a particular chapter. Well, if you find yourself in such situations and have to rely on Google Lens or Apple’s Live Text feature, the new PowerToys Text Extractor tool will make your life easy. With just a hotkey, you will be able to quickly grab text from pictures on Windows 11. Be it a screen capture from a video, a screenshot, a PDF file, or any image, if they have text, you can extract it right away. So to learn how to extract text from images on Windows 11, follow our guide below.
Grab Text From Images on Windows (2022)
The Text Extractor was added to PowerToys in September, so you will need the updated version of the program (v0.62.0 or later). The best part about PowerToys’ Text Extractor is that you don’t need an active internet connection to extract text. It does the processing locally and rather quickly. With that said, let’s jump to the steps and learn how to grab text from images on Windows 11.
1. First, you need to install Microsoft PowerToys (Free) from the Microsoft Store. You can also download the program from the official website.
2. After installing the program, open it and move to the “Text Extractor” section from the left sidebar. Here, make sure Text Extractor is enabled in the right pane to extract text from images in Windows 11. As shown in the screenshot, you need to press “Windows + Shift + T” to perform the action. You can click the “pen” icon next to the “Activation shortcut” to customize it to your liking.
3. Now, open the image you wish to extract text from. For example – here is a screenshot from one of our articles. Press the Windows 11 keyboard shortcut “Windows + Shift + T” and select the region from which you want to extract text.
4. The Text Extractor tool will automatically grab the text and copy it to your clipboard. Next, open Notepad or your favorite text editor and paste the text by pressing “Ctrl + V“. The text from the image will be copied to the text file with near-perfect accuracy.
5. We even tried grabbing text from old books with illegible text, and it worked well. As you can see, it has extracted the text quite well, and that too with correct punctuation and indentation.
6. If you are looking for an alternative to PowerToys Text Extractor, try out Text Grab (Free on GitHub, $9.99 on MS Store), which runs on Microsoft’s Windows.Media.Ocr API and comes with advanced features.
Quickly Extract Text From Images on Windows 10/11
So this is how the Text Extractor feature in Microsoft PowerToys works on Windows 11 and 10. The OCR processing is quite fast, and I am surprised at the results. Even without internet connectivity, it can locally grab text from images with impressive accuracy. Anyway, that is all for this guide. If you want to test another PowerToys feature, follow our article on how to get a Universal Mute Switch for video calls on Windows 10/11. And for an exhaustive guide on how to use PowerToys on Windows 10/11, follow the link. Finally, if you have any queries, let us know in the comment section below.
Thank you for the helpful guide! This worked well!
You can also copy paste the photo in one note it’s pretty fast too
Thank you! VERY helpful tip, as I don’t have the admin privileges to add any new programs on my work PC. You’re a lifesaver!