How to turn images into editable text with Easy Screen OCR on the Mac

If you have screenshots, photos and other images that contain lots of text, it can be easily extracted and pasted into your word processor in seconds using a free utility for macOS.

OCR (optical character recognition) is the process of extracting text from images such as JPEG photos and making it editable by saving it as plain text. Easy Screen OCR is a tiny app for the Mac that does just that, but it does it in an unusual way.

Why might you want to convert images to text?

• You could photograph paper-based documents using the camera on a phone and then turn them into editable text.
• You could extract the text from old scans of documents saved as image files.
• You could extract text from photographs with signs and notices.
• You could extract text from applications that display text on the screen.

There are probably even more uses for OCR and basically anything that can be displayed on the screen that contains text can be turned into a text file.

Grab the screen

Easy Screen OCR is less than a megabyte and takes up hardly any disk space. When it is run, it adds an icon to the menu bar and clicking it displays a menu with Capture Screenshot on it.

The idea is that you display the image on the screen, such as a photo or an application, and then click Capture screenshot. The mouse is then used to select the window to capture.

A small window is displayed with two tabs. The Image tab shows the screen capture and the OCR button extracts the text and places it on the Text tab.

Switch to the Text tab and a Copy button copies the text to the Mac's clipboard. It can then be pasted into any application you want, such as a word processor like TextEdit.

I took a photo of a document on my phone and displayed it using Quick Look (select a file in Finder and press spacebar). Easy Screen OCR then took a screenshot and turned it into text.

It wasn't a particularly good photo and the screen resolution was quite low at 1280 x 800 (a pre-retina display MacBook), but the app did a great job of turning it into text.

OCR results

It isn't quite perfect and there are a couple of problems. One is a minor one and it puts a carriage return at the end of each line. You need to join the lines of text in the window before copying the text or in your word processor after pasting the text in.

The second problem is a bit more irritating and it does not appear to support multiple columns of text. It read left to right across the page and mixed the text from each column. Apart from that, it was very accurate, even with poor images, and I was impressed.

Here is fuzzy white text on a red background and the top line is as bent as a banana but Easy Screen OCR got it nearly all right. There was even worse text at the bottom and it did a good job of reading that too. It wasn't perfect, but I could hardly read it myself.

There isn't much in this app apart from OCRing text but it is possible to save the screen grab to disk as a PNG or PDF file.

It does not seem possible that such a small app can do what it does, but apparently it does all the hard work in the cloud. It does its OCR magic online. I wonder how much traffic it can handle?

According to the website, no files are stored online and your privacy is protected.

For a free utility, Easy Screen OCR does a good job of extracting text from photos and anything else you can display on the screen.

App: Easy Screen OCR (Mac App Store)
Price: Free
By: Tong Zhang
Size: 0.7 MB
macOS: 10.11 or later
Verdict: A useful tool for turning images into text