Phone Link for Windows will allow you to copy text from photos from your Android phone
Robert Triggs / Android Authority TL;DR You’ll soon be able to use Phone Link to copy text from photos on your Android phone, allowing you to use it in Windows 11. This should be faster than using the text feature of the Snipping tool. The feature is only available in pre-release versions of Windows 11 […]
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
TL;DR
- You’ll soon be able to use Phone Link to copy text from photos on your Android phone, allowing you to use it in Windows 11.
- This should be faster than using the text feature of the Snipping tool.
- The feature is only available in pre-release versions of Windows 11 at the moment, but it should be available in stable Windows 11 soon.
Windows recently gained optical character recognition (OCR) technology through the Snipping tool, allowing you to grab text from images and paste it into your application of choice. What if you want to recover text from photos from your phone and use it on your computer? Well, you can copy these photos to your PC first, or you can use this new Phone Link feature.
Windows Central OCR feature spotted in Phone Link app (h/t: The edge) on Windows 11. The feature appears as a “text” icon when viewing your phone’s photos in the Photos section of Phone Link. Tapping the icon will launch character recognition and you can then select specific text, highlight all text, or copy all text.
It should be noted that this feature is currently reserved for users in the Release Preview channel. Indeed, I am unable to 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 search for text with the appropriate button. But the image needs to be accessible locally, so you’ll need to plug in your phone or save the photos to your PC. Meanwhile, this new approach means you only need your phone connected to your PC via Phone Link. So we hope that this new OCR feature will be rolled out to all users as soon as possible.
