Windows · Utility

QuickOCR

Drag a box around anything on screen and get its text.

A portable snipping tool for Windows. Nothing to install, and it reads text on your own PC, so it works offline and your screenshots stay with you.

Download QuickOCR View source

The QuickOCR window: a Capture text button with the hint to drag a box around any text, and a Language menu set to English and French.

Platform: Windows
Built with: Python
Latest version: 1.2.0
Price: Free

What it is

QuickOCR turns text you can see but can't select into text you can use. Drag a box around it, and the words are yours.

It's handy for text in images, videos, games, PDFs and anywhere else copy and paste doesn't work, including game menus and trading cards where the background is noisy.

It's portable: a single .exe with nothing to install and no admin rights needed. The text recognition happens on your own PC with a bundled copy of Tesseract, so it works offline and your screenshots never leave your machine.

QuickOCR is finished. Version 1.2.0 is the final release. The Windows Snipping Tool can now copy text straight out of a screenshot (Text actions, on Windows 11), which covers most of what QuickOCR does, so I wrapped the project up. It still works and stays available, but no further updates or support are planned.

Highlights

Small tool, one job.

Visual snipping

Draw a box on your screen to capture text.

Bilingual

English and French ship together, read together or one at a time.

Add your own language

Drop any Tesseract .traineddata file in and pick it in the app.

Anti-holographic filters

Special filters to read text on noisy or coloured backgrounds, like game menus and trading cards.

Offline and private

Recognition happens on your PC. Nothing is uploaded.

Portable

One .exe. No installer, no admin rights.

Copied for you

The text goes to your clipboard automatically, ready to paste.

Warns when unsure

The result popup shows a warning when Tesseract isn't sure of the read, so you can check before pasting.

Open source

The source is on GitHub, and build.bat builds the single .exe.

Getting started

Five steps, no install.

Download QuickOCR.exe

Get it from the latest release on GitHub. You need Windows 10 or 11, and nothing else: Tesseract is bundled.
Run it

It's a single file. There's nothing to install.
Click Capture text

The screen dims while the capture overlay is up.
Draw a box around any text

Drag over the words you want.
Paste

The text is copied to your clipboard automatically. To cancel a capture, click once without dragging, right-click, or press Esc.

In detail

A few details.

Reading awkward text

Game menus and trading cards are full of holographic and busy backgrounds that confuse ordinary text recognition. QuickOCR applies filters made for noisy and coloured backgrounds before it reads the words.

Languages

It ships with English and French, which you can read together or one at a time. Tesseract is most accurate with one language selected, so prefer a single language over a long combination.

To add another, download its .traineddata file from tessdata_fast (for example deu.traineddata), put it in Tesseract-OCR/tessdata, and pick it from the Language dropdown.

Private by design

Recognition runs on your PC using a bundled copy of Tesseract, so it works offline and nothing is uploaded. It keeps a small log at %APPDATA%\QuickOCR\quickocr.log, which is handy to attach to a bug report.

Build it yourself

The source is on GitHub, and build.bat builds the single .exe. Building from source picks up every language you've added automatically.

Questions

Good to know.

The screen is dimmed and nothing happens

That's the capture overlay. Press Esc, right-click, or click once to dismiss it.

The text came out wrong

The result popup shows a warning when Tesseract is unsure of the read, so check it before pasting.

Text in another language comes out garbled

QuickOCR can only recognise the languages it ships with, so Größe may read as GroBe and niño as nino. Add the language: see Languages above.

Should I use QuickOCR or the Snipping Tool?

On Windows 11, the Snipping Tool's Text actions can copy text out of a screenshot and cover most of what QuickOCR does. QuickOCR is still handy on Windows 10, fully offline, for game menus with noisy backgrounds, and for languages you add yourself.

How do I report a bug?

QuickOCR writes a log to %APPDATA%\QuickOCR\quickocr.log, and attaching it to a GitHub issue makes a problem far easier to track down. Keep in mind that QuickOCR is no longer being updated.

Need the text from somewhere you can't copy?

Download the single .exe and run it. It's free, portable and works offline.