July 10, 2019
17.9K
It’s super easy to copy and paste text from websites, Word documents and emails, just to name a few. What if you want to copy text from screenshots or images? You’ll need a piece of OCR software. This article will show you how to OCR screenshot or image on Mac in 6 different ways.
Free DownloadOCR is the abbreviation of Optical Character Recognition. According to Wikipedia, it is the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text.
Sometimes, we may have some images that contain a lot of text and we need those. Before the advent of OCR technology, people usually input manually which is time consuming. But with the OCR technology and OCR software, you can extract the text from screenshot or image easily on mac.
OCR Mac apps vary in performance, capacities, speed and usability. Without an OCR tool, you never be able to extract texts from a photo or screenshot. Here we pick 6 best tools to OCR screenshot or image on Mac with accurate results.
In fact, OCR is never easy. Though there are so many OCR tools available, just several among them can bring satisfactory OCR results. Still, some of them come with a high price tag. Luckily, we have Cisdem PDF Converter OCR.
Cisdem PDF Converter OCR for Mac is a PDF converter with a powerful OCR engine, providing the best solution for screenshot /image OCR on Mac. It packs in a PDF converter and PDF creator, allowing users to manipulate their PDF files easily and efficiently.
Free DownloadDownload and install Cisdem PDF Converter OCR for Mac. A free trial is offered. Launch it. Add screenshot or image for OCR by dragging and dropping or by clicking the add button.
Click the format dropdown list to select an export format. To extract plain text from images, just select the option to TXT. If you want it to retain formatting, choose to DOCX. If it’s a screenshot of a scanned table, then to Excel can be the best output option.
Then choose file language.
For better OCR results, you can click on the Advanced Settings icon. A new interface will appear and you will notice all the contents are marked in different colorful boxes. Make sure all
all the OCR applied zone are marked properly, if not, manually adjust. For example, if you want to output a selected part as table, remove the mark box in this zone, click on "Mark Tables" toolbar in the OCR applied zone, then drag a mark box to select the preferred part. You can resize the mark box by dragging its corners.
Click Convert, select a location to save the output file and click Save to OCR screen capture on Mac.
Prizmo is another program allowing users to OCR and extract text content from PDF files or images such as PNG, JPEG and TIFF. By default, Mac saves screenshots as PNG, so you can use this tool to effortlessly OCR text from screenshots or other images. It can perform OCR in 25 languages such as English, Finnish and French. However, it doesn’t support exporting to some widely used formats such as Word and Excel.
To OCR screenshot on Mac, you can also use PDFpen. It can digitize scanned documents by using OCR and allows you to effectively extract content from images and scanned documents. There are a number of output formats supported by PDFpen, such as Word, plain text, rich text and images. However, you can’t directly OCR screen capture to Excel.
It is a basic screenshot-taking tool with OCR functionality. This lightweight desktop app allows users to easily capture a screenshot and perform OCR on it. It currently only supports OCR in English, but users can expect more supported language with the future updates.
Easy Screen OCR for Mac is somewhat like an advanced version of Screenotate. It supports over 100 languages. It only works on screenshots and allows extracting plain text only from screenshots. You can’t add files from folders or other sources. But you are able to utlize this tool to translate the screenshot texts into 20+ languages, including English, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Thailand, etc.
OnlineOCR.net is a free online service that you can use to OCR images and PDF files. It’s web-based and compatible on all platforms including Mac. It supports 46 languages and allows you to OCR screenshots or images to Excel, Text and Word. The accuracy is relatively higher than its competitors.
To OCR screenshot or image on Mac, you have many choices. If your work involves OCR and manipulation of PDF files, professional software like Cisdem PDF Converter OCR will definitely be very useful. They can OCR text, tables and complex formatting and provide enough export options. For an occasional need to OCR screens for plain text extraction, a simple screen ocr or online ocr tool is worth a try.
Rosa has worked in Mac software industry for more than eight years. She believes that the purpose of software is to make life better and work more productively. In addition to writing, Rosa is also an avid runner.
Sila
So far, Cisdem is the best one to ocr my image texts, it is accurate and fast.
jamie89
Never expect that I can extract the text from image capture so easily.
Keith M
I tried online OCR tool to export the text from an image text, the text is missing badly. Just now, I tried yours, good, at least, no text is missing and the format retains.
Justin827
I had a image, and I wanted to extract text from it, this article helped me. Thank you.