Copy text from any screenshot with built-in OCR

The text in an image is trapped — until OCR sets it free. Snow Shot recognizes text directly in screenshots and images, rebuilds tables, and translates the result — locally on your machine, no uploads, no retyping.

What screenshot OCR is good for

• Error messages. Copy the exact dialog text into a search engine or a support ticket instead of squinting and retyping it (and mistyping the one hex code that matters).
• Code from screenshots and videos. Grab the snippet from a tutorial frame or a colleague's screenshot and paste it into your editor.
• Documents and photos. Whiteboards, receipts, scanned pages, photos of printed text — all become selectable, searchable text.
• Tables. Table recognition rebuilds rows and columns, so a screenshot of a price list or report becomes structured data instead of one long scrambled line.
• Foreign-language captures. Recognize, then translate the text in place — menus, dialogs and documents in another language stop being dead ends.

How to extract text with Snow Shot

1. Install Snow Shot from the download page. For OCR that works fully offline out of the box, choose the offline installer — it bundles the default OCR resources.
2. Capture the text with the screenshot hotkey, selecting the region that contains it — or open an existing image.
3. Run text recognition from the capture toolbar (assign it a hotkey in settings if you use it daily). For grids of data, use table recognition instead.
4. Copy the clean result. Review the recognized text, optionally translate it, and copy it in one step.

Getting better OCR results

• Capture tight. Select just the text block. Desktop clutter and window chrome only confuse recognition.
• Zoom first. If the source is small, enlarge it before capturing — more pixels per letter means fewer mistakes, especially with code and numbers.
• Watch look-alike characters. In code, 0/O and 1/l/I are the classic swaps. A quick proofread of identifiers and numbers is worth it.
• Mini users: text recognition in Snow Shot Mini is an on-demand feature — enable manual text recognition in settings and it downloads the first time you use it. Table recognition is full-edition only.

Why local OCR matters

Many web OCR tools ask you to upload the image to a server — a bad idea for screenshots containing contracts, customer data, credentials or unreleased work. Snow Shot's recognition runs on your own machine (with the offline package), so the screenshot never leaves your computer. It's also simply faster: no upload, no queue, no file-size limit.

Need the step-by-step walkthrough? Read how to copy text from a screenshot on Windows 11.