Screenotate For Mac

There are plenty of ways to grab a screenshot, but extracting text from a captured image normally requires an additional step – putting it through an OCR engine. This whole process can be quite time-consuming unless you find an app that combines these two functions.

Screenotate is a screenshot capture utility that comes with an additional feature – it uses an optical character recognition (OCR) engine to identify text in your screenshots. The text is then saved as an HTML file that can be searched for easily.

The app is quite simple to use. Once it is running, you can bring up the selection box using a hotkey and then define the area where the text is located. If you use the alternative hotkey, the image is also copied to the clipboard.

After the image has been captured, the application uses its OCR engine to identify and extract text, which is then saved to an HTML file, along with a timestamp, the window title and, for some browsers, the URL. The screenshot can also be saved separately as a PNG file.

If you click the app’s icon in the menu bar, you can type any text in the search field to try to find a screenshot that includes relevant information. Since a lot of metadata is recorded, you should be able to find a particular item by searching for anything related to it.

The vast majority of OCR engines are web-based, which is an issue for privacy-oriented users. Both the screenshot and extracted text could be stored on a remote server, and this is something many users are not comfortable with.

Screenotate, however, never uploads any files. The OCR engine runs on your computer, and you don’t even need the app to manage your screenshots.

Overall, this is a very interesting application that could prove incredibly useful if you often need to extract text from screen captures. It is quite easy to use and comes with a powerful OCR engine, though it has to be noted that only English is supported at present.