Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a very useful technique that extracts text from a scanned image or an image photo. It’s been widely used as a form of information entry from printed copies in many places. Often times, a scanning solution with built-in OCR feature is adopted and implemented to speed up the workflow. However, if you don’t have such convenient scanning features handy, are there any other ways to use this technology?
Here are a few options that you can use on Windows 10
OneNote
That’s right. If you are already using OneNote, you already have a heck of tool at your disposal. Simply right-click the image that contains the text you want to extract, choose Picture and then Copy Text.
Google Drive
Google Drive, Google Docs more specifically, has a little-known free OCR feature included for you. All you need to do is upload the image file to Google Drive first and open it with Google Docs.
Once the image file is opened in Google Docs, the words embedded in the image file are already extracted and pasted in the same document. Quite efficient, I would agree.
Photo Scan
Photo Scan is a free UWP app that comes with an OCR feature built-in that extracts text easily from photos or images file imported to the app, whether it’s an image file from your computer, or in the clipboard, or taken from the camera.
Capture2Text
Capture2Text is an free portable tool that lets you to quickly OCR a portion of the screen using a keyboard shortcut. The resulting text will be saved to the clipboard by default. It supports 90+ languages, not only English but also Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, etc.
FreeOCR
FreeOCR is a free OCR tool that supports scanning from most Twain scanners and can also open most scanned PDF’s and multi page Tiff images as well as popular image file formats. It outputs plain text that can be directly exported to Microsoft Word Format. If you are looking for a tool that OCRs not only image files but also PDFs, FreeOCR could be your guy for the job.
That’s about it for now. It’s highly possible that there are many other options out there we didn’t cover. But if any of these is help you out in any way, enjoy.