GUIDE
How to copy text out of a screenshot
6 August 2026
An error message you cannot search. A code snippet in a picture. Text recognition turns the pixels back into characters you can paste.
The free options first
Windows Snipping Tool has text actions built in on Windows 11: take a capture, then use Text actions to select and copy. PowerToys Text Extractor (Win+Shift+T) does the same thing system-wide and is free from Microsoft. If either works for you, you are done.
When they struggle
Built-in recognition is trained for ordinary prose on light backgrounds. It
tends to lose accuracy on small text, dark themes, and code, which is exactly
where developers need it most. Punctuation and identifiers suffer first:
underscores vanish, l and 1 merge, and words run
together.
What Clarus does differently
Clarus runs two recognition engines and combines them. One is fast and good at knowing where words break; the other is far more accurate per character, especially on small, dark or monospaced text, but drops spaces in sparse layouts. Clarus keeps the accurate engine's characters and borrows the fast engine's word breaks, which fixes the failure neither engine can fix alone.
It runs entirely on your machine. No image is uploaded to recognise text.
How to use it
Press Ctrl+Shift+T, or pick Extract Text from the tray menu. The text appears in a window sized to fit it, so there is nothing to scroll or resize.