Copy Text From Images Is Back: Grab Text in 4.2
Allow Copy + removes copy protection from text. But when the words on a page are part of a picture, there is nothing to unlock, and every week we got emails saying the extension had stopped working. In most of those cases it was working fine: the text was an image. Version 4.2 brings back the feature that handles exactly this. Grab Text copies text from images and canvases without leaving the page.
Why some text can't be copied
Screenshots, scanned documents, infographics, memes and some online book readers don't contain letters at all. What you see is pixels. No unlock can make a picture selectable, so the text has to be recognized first.
A quick way to check: try to select a single word. If nothing gets highlighted, or the whole block turns blue at once, you are looking at an image.
How to copy text from an image
- Hover an image or a canvas. A small panel appears in its corner.
- Click “Grab Text”. The picture is recognized and the text is placed over it, in the same spots where you see it.
- Select the words you need with the mouse, or copy all of it with one click.
What's different this time
We didn't just switch the old feature back on. Most of it was written again.
- Recognition runs on our new server with a leading cloud recognition engine. It detects the language by itself and reads Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and many other scripts.
- The panel and the text layer over the image were redrawn from scratch.
- You don't need an account to try it. The free recognitions work right after install, no sign-in.
- Canvases are handled like pictures, so charts, web apps and readers that draw text on a canvas work too.
What happens to your images
The image leaves your browser only when you click “Grab Text”. It goes to our server and a cloud text recognition service, the recognized text comes back, and we don't store either of them.
Free and paid parts
The hint over images is free, and copy unlocking in Allow Copy + stays free as it always was. Recognition comes with 5 free tries so you can see that it works on your sites. Each recognized image costs us real money, so after that there are packs from 100 to 1000 images for 30 days. It's a one-time payment, not a subscription.
Don't need the hint?
Click the gear on the panel to open the settings and turn off “Show detection text from image overlay”. The rest of the extension keeps working as before.
Questions about 4.2.0
›How do I copy text from an image in Chrome?
Install Allow Copy +, hover over the image and click “Grab Text” on the panel that appears. The recognized text shows up over the picture: select what you need or copy all of it.
›Why can't I copy text even with Allow Copy + turned on?
Most likely the text is part of an image or is drawn on a canvas. Unlocking works only on real text, so for pictures use Grab Text, which recognizes the text first.
›Does Grab Text work on canvas elements?
Yes, in most cases. Charts, online readers and web apps that draw text on a canvas are handled the same way as regular images.
Allow Copy + 4.2.0 is available in the Chrome Web Store. If you already have the extension, Chrome will update it on its own.
See how Grab Text works
