Robert Triggs / Android Authority
TL; DR
- Soon you'll be able to use Phone Link to copy text from your Android phone's photos so you can use it in Windows 11.
- This should be faster than using the Snipping Tool's text functionality.
- The feature is currently only available in preview builds of Windows 11, but should be available in stable Windows 11 soon.
Windows recently gained optical character recognition (OCR) technology through the Snipping Tool, which allows you to extract text from images and paste it into the app of your choice. But what if you want to extract text from your phone photos and use them on your computer? You can copy those photos to your PC first, or you can use this new Phone Link feature.
Windows Central Spotted OCR functionality in the Phone Link app (h/t: The edge) on Windows 11. The feature appears as a 'text' icon when you view your phone's photos in the Photos section of Phone Link. Tapping the icon will start character recognition. Then you can select specific text, highlight all text, or copy all text.
It's worth noting that this feature is currently limited to users in the Release Preview channel. Indeed, I cannot see this feature on my stable Windows 11 laptop.
Microsoft already offers similar functionality in the Snipping Tool, allowing you to open any image file and scan it for text using the relevant button. But the image needs to be accessible locally, so you'll need to plug in your phone or have the photos saved to your PC. Meanwhile, this new approach means you only need to connect your phone to your PC via Phone Link. So we hope that this new OCR feature will be rolled out to all users sooner rather than later.