How to Read Screenshots using IronOCR

Screenshots are a quick and easy way to share information and quickly capture vital information to send to colleagues and peers. However, extracting text from screenshots has often proven difficult because of the dimensions and noise involved in taking them. This makes screenshots a less effective medium in the release of OCR.

However, IronOCR resolves that issue by providing specialized methods such as ReadScreenshot to combat this. ReadScreenshot is optimized for reading screenshots and extracting information from them; it also accepts common file formats.

To use this function, you must also install the IronOcr.Extension.AdvancedScan package.

Quickstart: Read Text from a Screenshot

Get started in seconds using IronOCR's ReadScreenshot—just load your screenshot into an OcrInput, call ReadScreenShot, and immediately access the extracted text, confidence score, and text regions via the OcrPhotoResult. It’s the fastest way to turn images into usable text with minimal setup.

In this guide, we'll quickly demonstrate how to use IronOCR for screenshot text recognition, walking through examples and the properties of the result object.

:path=/static-assets/ocr/content-code-examples/how-to/read-screenshot-read-screenshot.cs

using IronOcr;
using System;
using System.Linq;

// Instantiate OCR engine
var ocr = new IronTesseract();

using var inputScreenshot = new OcrInput();
inputScreenshot.LoadImage("screenshotOCR.png");

// Perform OCR
OcrPhotoResult result = ocr.ReadScreenShot(inputScreenshot);

// Output screenshot information
Console.WriteLine(result.Text);
Console.WriteLine(result.TextRegions.First().Region.X);
Console.WriteLine(result.TextRegions.Last().Region.Width);
Console.WriteLine(result.Confidence);

Imports IronOcr
Imports System
Imports System.Linq

' Instantiate OCR engine
Private ocr = New IronTesseract()

Private inputScreenshot = New OcrInput()
inputScreenshot.LoadImage("screenshotOCR.png")

' Perform OCR
Dim result As OcrPhotoResult = ocr.ReadScreenShot(inputScreenshot)

' Output screenshot information
Console.WriteLine(result.Text)
Console.WriteLine(result.TextRegions.First().Region.X)
Console.WriteLine(result.TextRegions.Last().Region.Width)
Console.WriteLine(result.Confidence)