Extracting text from an image is easy enough nowadays, as there are plenty of online OCR engines that can recognize text after scanning an image. However, capturing an image and uploading it to the cloud is time-consuming, and it makes organizing the text quite difficult.

Screenotate is a useful application designed to make the process a lot more straightforward. It allows you to capture something from your desktop and run it through a local OCR engine in seconds, saving you a lot of time and effort.

Grabbing a screenshot is simple enough. After using the configured hotkey, you will be able to select the area of the screen that you wish to capture. If using the alternative key combination, the image is also sent to the clipboard.

The screenshot is put through the built-in OCR engine immediately. If any text is present, it should be identified and extracted. The image, text and metadata are then saved in an HTML file. However, there is no option to save the image separately.

The program captures more than just an image and text. It also includes a timestamp, the window’s title and app name, and for some browsers even the URL is extracted.

If you want to find a specific screenshot, you can click the application’s tray icon and type a relevant keyword in the search field. The program uses the Windows search function to find files.

One of the advantages of using Screenotate is that everything is done locally. You will not have to upload images to a cloud OCR engine and risk having your data stored on a remote server.

All in all, Screenotate is a great tool for users who need to extract text from images on a regular basis. It is easy to use and quite accurate based on our tests, but it lacks a couple of features when compared to the macOS app.