TL;DR: I set up Greenshot with Text-Grab to OCR my screenshots after being dissatisfied with popular solutions.

Background

I use Greenshot for better control over screenshots on Windows. While the program, in theory, comes with optical character recognition (OCR) support (which lets you extract text from images), its built-in OCR plugin relies on Microsoft Office Document Imaging, a Microsoft Office component that is officially retired as of 2025.

Thankfully, Greenshot has a built-in feature which allows you to call external commands. This SuperUser answer explains the process of configuring Greenshot with Capture2Text, an open-source OCR program which appears to solve my problem. Unfortunately, this program is no longer maintained and its accuracy wasn’t the best in my experience.

Enter Text-Grab, the program which Microsoft PowerToys uses for its own OCR functionality. It runs on the built-in Windows OCR API for speed and simplicity.

Configuring Greenshot with Text-Grab

(These steps assume that you have Greenshot installed.)

  1. Download the latest release of Text-Grab (the Self-Contained zip file)

  2. Run Text-Grab.exe, open settings, and configure it as a background service

  3. Open Greenshot settings, navigate to Plugins, and go to the configuration for External Command Plugin.

  4. In the plugin configuration, create a new external command.

  5. Fill out the command details by providing the path to Text-Grab.exe, ex: C:\Programs\Text-Grab.exe

  6. Click “OK” on each dialog. Now, when you take a screenshot, you will see a new option available for TextGrab.

  7. When you select the TextGrab option, Greenshot will pass your image as an argument to Text-Grab.exe, which will open a window where you can view and edit the scanned text.

Conclusion

This post is about two awesome pieces of free software. If you want to support Greenshot you can donate directly here, and if you want to support Text-Grab it’s available for purchase on the Windows Store.

All opinions are my own. This post is not sponsored.