ShareX OCR: Copy Text from Any Screen

What is ShareX OCR?

ShareX includes a built-in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) 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 to Use OCR 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. You can also use the OCR entry under Capture menu manually

Languages and Accuracy

ShareX supports multiple OCR languages through Tesseract. You can configure:

• Language selection in Task Settings → OCR tab
• Primary languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, and 100+ more
• For best accuracy, ensure your screenshots are high-resolution with clear text

Common Use Cases

• Copying error messages for troubleshooting
• 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 snippets from tutorial videos or screenshots

Tips for Better Results

• Use region capture to isolate the text area — less background noise means better accuracy
• Higher resolution screenshots produce more accurate OCR results
• For multi-language documents, set OCR to the dominant language for best results
• Combine with After capture tasks to automate the OCR process