Text Extractor is one of the utilities included with Microsoft Powertoys and provides the ability to copy text from images and video to the Windows Clipboard.

Using Text Extractor

There is no UI for Text Extractor, instead it is enabled via the activation shortcut of

which allows the selection of the text from an image or video and once done the text can be pasted to your application of choice. The animated gif at the start of this post shows an example of selecting the word commodore from an image on the Wikipedia Commodore 64 page and then paste it into VS Code.

The example below illustrates text being extracted from a YouTube video

Challenges

Sometimes the text extracted is not always accurate. In the example shown at the start of this post, when pasted the word commodore had on occasions one or more letters missing or incorrect. To mitigate this I have found making the image larger has helped to increase accuracy.

Acknowledgements

Text Extractor is based on Joseph Finney’s Text Grab. If you would like to know more, please visit the projects GitHub page.