Microsoft's Phone Link now lets you copy text from Android photos - how to try it
Microsoft's Phone Link is a free and handy app that can sync phone calls, messages, and notifications between your smartphone and your Windows PC. The Android version even lets you access photos from your phone. And now an upcoming new feature will be able to extract text from an Android photo, which you can then copy and paste into another app or file.
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Due to officially roll out in a future update to Phone Link, the OCR feature is currently accessible in the latest Windows Insider Preview build. I was able to use it in the Windows 11 26120 build. To test it yourself, you need to be running at least the latest Windows 11 Release Preview channel build, which you can grab by joining the Windows Insider Program.
Whether or not you have the right build, here's how the text extraction works.
On your Android phone, make sure you've shot at least one photo that contains text. After you've set up Phone Link in Windows 11, open the app and choose the Photos option. You'll see all the recent photos you've taken on your phone.
Click the Text icon at the top, and a menu pops up with two choices: 1) Select all text; and 2) Copy all text. Choosing either option ultimately lets you copy all the text in the image, so it doesn't really matter which one you pick. Open a text-based app, such as Notepad or Mail. Paste the extracted text into a blank file or email to see how well the OCR worked.
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In my testing, Phone Link was fairly accurate, though it did run into some hiccups. Text laid out in a plain layout generally fared better than text scattered around the image. Either way, you may have to reformat and reorganize the text after the paste. But the tool should be able to capture most, if not all, the text in an image.
With this latest skill, Phone Link joins a host of other apps that attempt to identify text in an image. The Windows 11 Snipping Tool lets you copy and paste text in a photo or other image. Microsoft Lens is another capture tool that can extract text from an image. Google Lens is one more program with built-in OCR. Otherwise, such scanning apps as Adobe Scan can also recognize text in an image.