How to copy text from an image on a PC or Chromebook
You have a picture or a screenshot with text you need, and right-clicking only offers to save or copy the whole image, never the words. Here is how to pull clean, editable text out of an image on Windows or a Chromebook in one click.
Neither Windows nor ChromeOS has a simple, built-in way to copy text out of any image. Windows has a few scattered options, ChromeOS has none for arbitrary pictures, and retyping is the fallback most people fall back to. The reliable answer on both is OCR: software that recognises the characters inside the image and hands them back as real text you can select and paste.
The fastest way: a one-click OCR extension
Extract Text from Image is a free Chrome extension that reads text from any picture or screenshot open in your browser. Because it runs in Chrome, the steps are identical on a Windows PC and a Chromebook.
- Add the extension to Chrome on your PC or Chromebook.
- Open the image in your browser, or open a screenshot you just took.
- Click the extension. It runs OCR and shows the recognised text.
- Copy all to the clipboard, or download it as a .txt file.
Copy text from any image
Works the same on Windows and ChromeOS. Free, one click.
Add to Chrome · freeOn Windows specifically
Windows does have a couple of native routes, but each has a catch. Snip & Sketch and the Snipping Tool can capture a region, and recent versions added a text action, but it is inconsistent across builds. PowerToys Text Extractor works well but is a separate install aimed at power users. If you already work in Chrome, an OCR extension is the least fiddly: the image is right there in the tab, and one click gives you the text.
On a Chromebook specifically
ChromeOS has no system feature that copies text out of a saved picture. Take a screenshot (Ctrl + Show windows, or Ctrl + Shift + Show windows for a region), open it in the browser, and run the extension on it. Since a Chromebook is built around Chrome, a Chrome extension is the natural fit and needs nothing else installed.
Private by design
The OCR runs on your device, so the picture is not uploaded to a server to be read. Nothing about the image leaves your machine, which matters when the screenshot holds an ID, a receipt or anything you would not paste into a random website. See how it works on screenshots and on photos of documents.