OCR - ShareX Feature for Windows

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

ShareX includes a built-in Optical Character Recognition engine that can extract text from any image or screenshot. When you capture a region of your screen, ShareX can automatically recognize and copy the text to your clipboard.

How OCR Works in ShareX

1. Capture a screenshot containing text (use region capture for best results)
2. After capture, go to After capture tasks and enable Recognize text (OCR)
3. ShareX will process the image and copy the recognized text to your clipboard
4. Alternatively, use the OCR entry under the Capture menu to process an existing image

Supported Languages

ShareX uses the Tesseract OCR engine, which supports well over 100 languages. You can configure:

Language Group	Examples
European	English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch
CJK	Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Japanese, Korean
Cyrillic	Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian
Indian	Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali
Middle Eastern	Arabic, Hebrew, Persian

Configuration

Configure OCR in Task Settings → OCR tab:

• Language selection — Choose one or more languages for recognition
• Silent mode — Run OCR without showing a progress window
• Show language selection window — Pick the language each time you run OCR

Accuracy Tips

For the best OCR results:

• Use high-resolution screenshots — Higher DPI means better character recognition
• Crop tightly — Remove unnecessary background elements to reduce noise
• Choose the right language — Selecting the correct language dramatically improves accuracy
• Ensure clear text — Avoid blurry, stylized, or heavily shadowed text
• Region capture — Use region selection to isolate the text area

Common Use Cases

• Copying error messages for troubleshooting or searching
• Extracting text from images when you can't select it normally
• Digitizing printed documents by taking a photo and running OCR
• Copying text from presentation slides or video frames
• Grabbing code from tutorial screenshots
• Translating foreign text by extracting it first, then using a translation tool

Integration with Workflows

OCR works seamlessly with ShareX workflows:

• Enable Recognize text (OCR) as an after-capture task for automatic processing
• Combine with Copy to clipboard to have text ready immediately
• Chain with custom uploaders to send extracted text to translation APIs
• Use with Save to file to archive both the image and its recognized text