OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a brilliant technology that enables you to extract text from images, photos, or scanned documents with one click. The OCR technology recognizes the text within the image file and then allows you to copy or extract all text and text layout information from picture files as well as scanned documents.
Although the Photos app in Windows 10 doesn’t support extracting text from image files, OCR technology is part of the Universal Windows Platform, and software developers can use this built-in technology to develop apps to extract text from image files.
Photo Scan app to scan photos and extract text
Photo Scan is a free (supports in-app purchases) app designed to help Windows 10 users to easily extract text from photo or image files. The Photo Scan app is simply brilliant as the moment you open a photo using this app, it automatically extracts and displays the text on the right side of the image or photo.
The extracted text can be saved to Text File Document, Rich Type Format, HTML File Document, CSS, and more. You can also copy extracted text to clipboard if you want to immediately use the text with some other program.
In addition to images saved on your Windows 10 PC, Photo Scan also supports the web camera so that you can quickly take the photo of a document and then extract text from it.
To quickly extract text from a picture file located on your PC, right-click on the picture file, click Open with, click Photo Scan.
The speech feature reads out all extracted text for you.
The left-pane of Photo Scan allows you to quickly view all recent photos and your photos collection.
With default settings, Photo Scan displays extracted text with a line break, but you can change it under settings.
Lastly, you can get rid of ads in the app by making the in-app purchase.
All-in-all Photo Scan is a free, lightweight, and brilliant piece of software for your Windows 10 PC. Visit the following Store link to install the app. By the way, this app has nothing to do with the recently released Google Photo Scan app.
Download and install Photo Scan (Store link)
