You screenshot things you cannot copy: an error in a terminal image, a quote in a PDF that blocks selection, a slide in a recorded talk, a code snippet in a tweet. The screenshot captures the pixels, but you still cannot use the text. Going from screenshot to text should be one step, and with the right tool it is.
The slow way
Take the screenshot, save it, open an OCR site, upload it, wait, copy the text, delete the file. Five steps and a server round-trip for what should be a single action. You will not keep doing that, so you end up retyping instead, which is worse.
The one-action way
The trick is to skip the file entirely and read the region directly. I built TextQuill, a free Chrome extension, around this idea, so here is how it works in practice:
- Region select — press
Alt+Shift+S, drag a box around any part of the screen, and get the text. No file saved, no upload. - Full page or visible area — capture the whole page or just what is on screen when you need everything at once.
- Clipboard paste — already have a screenshot copied? Paste it in with
Ctrl+Vand it reads straight from the clipboard. - Right-click an image — for images already on a page, right-click and extract without leaving the tab.
Because the OCR runs on your device, none of this uploads the capture anywhere, and the text lands in a searchable local history you can copy, export as .txt or .md, or have read aloud.
Who this is for
- Developers grabbing text out of screenshotted logs, stack traces, and diagrams.
- Students pulling notes off lecture slides and recorded sessions.
- Researchers lifting quotes from PDFs and images that block selection.
- Anyone who keeps a folder of screenshots they meant to transcribe.
For the full set of capture methods and languages, see how to extract text from an image in Chrome. If your captures are ever sensitive, the private, no-upload angle matters too.