Take screenshots you can search.
Screenotate is a screenshot-taking tool which works just like macOS's screenshot tool – one keyboard shortcut and drag – and it uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to recognize text in your screenshots. It's available for macOS and Windows.
Instabuy, I’d actually been looking for something like this for a long time. https://t.co/u40RAzCY3m
— Florent Crivello (@Altimor) November 23, 2017
Omar, this is fantastic.
— Bret Victor (@worrydream) November 22, 2017
This is a wonderful little tool. https://t.co/gPS7g1KuZB
— David Hodge (@DavidHodge) November 22, 2017
This is brilliant — I’ve wanted something like it for a long time
— Joel Burget (@dino_joel) November 23, 2017
Want to hear about feature updates or versions for iOS, Android, and other platforms?
-
"Wait, where did I see that?"
Screenotate records useful metadata, not just text. It can get the title of the window, originating URL, time the screenshot was taken, and more.
Each screenshot is a self-contained HTML file on your computer, which you can open up in your Web browser or share with friends.
-
Never lose a screenshot again.
Using Screenotate's menu pane, look at recent screenshots and quickly search your past screenshots. You can even drag and drop images directly from here into a chat with someone!
Click a screenshot to open it up in your browser, or right-click to reveal the screenshot file in Finder.
-
Your computer, not the cloud.
Unlike many notetaking, screenshot, and OCR services, Screenotate is a desktop app, not a cloud service. The OCR engine runs on your computer, not in the cloud. Your screenshot data never leaves your computer, unless you put your screenshot files on a service like Dropbox or iCloud yourself.
And as long as you have the HTML files around, you'll always be able to search and view your screenshots, even without Screenotate.
-
Choose the shortcuts you want.
On macOS, Screenotate can automatically replace the Apple screenshot function and use the same shortcuts, Shift-Command-4 and Control-Shift-Command-4. Or you can customize its shortcuts yourself. You can also set where Screenotate should save screenshots.
Notes
-
Screenotate requires Mac OS X 10.9, Windows 7, or newer.
-
Screenotate currently only supports OCR in English. Let me know if you're interested in multilanguage functionality.
-
Screenotate uses the modern LSTM-based version 4.0 of Google's popular Tesseract OCR engine, but it isn't perfect. In particular, it might not work as well on non-Retina (lower-DPI) displays.
-
If you set Screenotate to use Shift-Command-4 on Mac and then uninstall it, you might want to re-enable the original Mac shortcut. Go into the Keyboard section of System Preferences and re-enable the two original Mac screenshot functions under Shortcuts there.
-
At the moment, Screenotate can find and store the URL for screenshots from Chrome and macOS Safari, but not Firefox or other browsers.
-
Though Screenotate detects the correct window title for any window (active or inactive), its URL detection is not as solid: if you take a screenshot from any browser window, it will capture the URL of the frontmost window of that browser.
Credits
The camera icon is from Kidiladon on The Noun Project; it's licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.
Screenotate includes the Tesseract OCR engine, prerelease version 4.0, under the Apache 2.0 license.