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New Feature to add OCR Support #500
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While processing image having text output is complex workflow and I can't think easy solution for it. Probably there is many OCR software so it will be overkill to use ShareX for it anyway. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-best-ocr-tools-extracting-text-images/ |
understand, just wanted to share the Tesseract OCR that I see is being integrated into some other projects on GitHub right now so thought it might be a cool addon...in my opinion ShareX is absolutely perfect as it is right now! I have been using it for almost 5-6 years now and it is a piece of software that I use almost every single day! So again thank you @Jaex for keeping the project alive these past years and sharing it with the world! Everytime I see an update, I am just amazed at the software has evolved to be more awesome over and over again! With that said, I can't wait to see what else you come up with in the future. At the same time, I don't want the project to shed away to far from it;s main purpose and become some bloated piece of crap! I am confidant that you will not allow that to happen though as you have only added awesome and useful features so far, so thanks again and look forward to the future of ShareX! BTW I am constantly promoting the app to other people as I feel like it really is a hidden Gem! So many people would love this app if they just knew it existed and more importantly knew just how powerful and how many feature it has! It;s hard to teach people of all the good features though as people are lazy and wont take the time to discover and learn things...either way it;s there loss! I will keep spreading the word though!
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I was about to suggest this myself, so I'll at least give my 2 cents. @Jaex, while I agree that OCR can get complex, I think you may be thinking of a different use case than what was intended here. OCR of photos and scans is a whole different world, but a much simpler use case - and in my opinion more useful for a tool like ShareX - is copying text from screenshots or other images to the clipboard. I used to have an application for exactly that use case years ago, and I still miss it often. It could not read anything complex, but it handled normal fonts better than OCR software meant for photos. I would love to have that in ShareX behind another screenshot hotkey, as I'm already used to how ShareX works. I would rather not get another application for that. I disagree that this functionality would be overkill, or out of the scope of ShareX, since there is already text and clipboard handling and uploading. To me it would make sense for ShareX to combine screenshot + text via OCR. As jasondavis said, Tesseract may be one option to look into. However, I understand if this is not a high priority :) EDIT: Another crazy idea solution could be to let the user select an endpoint to upload the image to, and use the resulting text as output (to clipboard?). Something like that. Could be offloaded into an OCR app online. |
Here is another option, as used by Greenshot:
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@Jaex on the OCR endpoint idea, here are some free solutions that some users might be able to use: Microsoft's Computer Vision API - https://www.projectoxford.ai/pricing - free quota 5,000/month |
This would be great as a plugin to ShareX, or simply included out of the box. |
Update, I just tried Capture2Text from http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-best-ocr-tools-extracting-text-images/ . I works pretty much like I want to, hotkey to start a rectangle selection, move mouse then mouse click to end rectangle selection. Parsed text is then copied to clipboard. It would be awesome to have something similar in ShareX, but obviously there are working alternatives out there. |
Really cool feature, thanks! But several suggestions:
Thanks in advance! |
May I ask what service provider the api is being used from ? Also, just a short warning @ ShareX's users using this OCR feature. While I do use it myself, and totally appreciate it's integration to ShareX, please always consider that everything you scan using this API is sent directly to the OCR service provider. (so at the very least, avoid scanning password,passphrase,sensitive image, wallet address, qrcode, private key, etc...) @Jaex : Would you know of any "on-premise" or "self-hosted" alternative we could use instead of the third-party's API for this ? Would be a great privacy enhancement. |
Would be cool to see a way to integrate the command line tool Tesseract OCR to be able to upload an image with text on it and have ShareX run the image through Tesseract OCR and then upload the image and then upload the text file that Tesseract OCR creates containing the text it read and detected from the image.
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