The best OCR Chrome extensions, honestly compared
We tested the OCR extensions people actually install — Copyfish, Project Naptha, Selectext, SnapIndex and the long tail behind them — and matched each one to the use case it's genuinely best for.
Updated May 2026 · 9 min read · By the SnapIndex team
The short version
If you only read one section
- Best free pickCopyfish — most popular, simplest “select region → get text” workflow. ~800K users, 4.0★ rating, free.
- Best for videoSelectext — purpose-built for YouTube/Udemy/Coursera, preserves code indentation.
- Best for in-page imagesProject Naptha — highlights text inside images already on the page, no capture needed (but barely maintained).
- Best for daily useSnapIndex — every capture is automatically OCR'd and saved into a searchable library. Stop losing your screenshots.
- Pure offline / privacyImage Reader (OCR) with the Tesseract.js engine — runs locally, no cloud calls.
The OCR extension market is two categories pretending to be one
When you search “OCR Chrome extension,” Google returns a soup of tools that look interchangeable. They're not.
Most articles in this category list ten extensions in a row and rate them 4.5/5 each. That isn't useful, because these tools solve fundamentally different problems — and pretending otherwise leads people to install something that's wrong for them, get frustrated, and uninstall.
After looking at install counts, ratings, and what users actually complain about in reviews, the OCR Chrome extension space cleanly splits in two:
Grab-and-go tools. You see text inside an image, you select it with your mouse, you paste it somewhere else. Done. The text exists in your clipboard for a few seconds, then it's gone. Copyfish, Project Naptha, Selectext, and the dozens of “Copy Text from Image” clones all live here. They're optimised for speed and zero friction.
Capture-and-keep tools. You capture something — a screenshot, a full page, a sequence of steps — and the OCR happens in the background while the original is saved to a library you can search later. SnapIndex sits in this category, more or less alone among Chrome extensions. The comparable products are usually desktop apps like Evernote (which has largely deprioritised this), OneNote, or DEVONthink.
If you only need a few words from one image right now, the grab-and-go tools are the right pick. If you find yourself OCR'ing the same kind of thing repeatedly and losing your captures into a Downloads folder, that's a capture-and-keep problem and a grab-and-go tool will frustrate you.
The comparison table
Install counts and ratings are from the Chrome Web Store as of May 2026. We've rounded to the nearest meaningful tier.
| Extension | Users | Rating | Best for | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SnapIndexCapture + OCR + searchable libraryThis is us | New | — | Daily users who lose track of screenshots | Free + Pro |
| CopyfishFree OCR Software by OCR.space | ~800K | 4.0 ★ | One-off text grabs from images/PDFs | Free |
| SelectextCopy Text From Videos | ~200K | 4.3 ★ | Text from YouTube, Udemy, Coursera | Freemium |
| Project Napthaby Kevin Kwok | ~100K | 3.6 ★ | Selecting text in already-loaded images | Free |
| Image Reader (OCR)Tesseract.js + IBM Granite | ~50K | 3.7 ★ | Offline / privacy-first OCR | Free |
| Copy Text from Imagecopy-text-from-image.com | ~10K | 4.5 ★ | Lightweight, no-frills clipboard OCR | Free |
Note: “Users” reflects active install counts from Chrome Web Store listings and chrome-stats.com aggregators. Ratings are average store ratings rounded to one decimal. We've omitted extensions with persistent policy-violation or malware reports.
Pick by what you're actually trying to do
If you can describe your use case in one sentence, the answer is usually obvious.
“I just want to grab text from this one image”
→ Copyfish
Battle-tested, 800K users, free. Click the icon, drag a region, paste. Done.
“I'm watching a tutorial and need the code”
→ Selectext
Purpose-built for video. Preserves indentation for Python, supports 50+ languages.
“This webpage has text trapped in images”
→ Project Naptha
Works in-place on already-loaded images — no capture step. Bit dated, but free.
“I do this every week and lose my captures”
→ SnapIndex
Every capture is OCR'd and indexed. Search by the text inside any screenshot months later.
“I need OCR that runs fully offline”
→ Image Reader (OCR)
Tesseract.js mode runs locally in your browser. No cloud calls, no data leaves your machine.
“I need to OCR scanned PDFs at scale”
→ Desktop, not Chrome
Honestly: ABBYY FineReader, Adobe Acrobat Pro, or Tesseract CLI. Browser extensions aren't built for batch.
Honest breakdowns
What each tool actually does well, and what its users complain about.
Copyfish
The default answer for “I just need to copy text from an image” — and has been since 2015.
Copyfish is built by the team behind OCR.space and uses their cloud OCR API. Click the toolbar icon, draw a box around the text you want, and the extracted text appears in a small popup ready to copy. It works on web images, PDFs displayed in Chrome, and even paused video frames.
What's good
- Massive install base — most-used OCR extension by an order of magnitude
- Multi-language support including Chinese, Japanese, Arabic
- Open-source under GPL, code on GitHub
- No account required
What's not
- Cloud OCR — images get sent to OCR.space servers
- Reviews mention reliability issues on certain PDFs and sites
- The result popup is bulky; users frequently ask for a smaller UI
- No history — once you close the popup, the result is gone
Selectext: Copy Text From Videos
The only OCR extension worth installing if you spend your day in Udemy and YouTube tutorials.
Selectext is narrowly focused on one job: copying text that appears on screen inside a paused video. Hit Alt+S (Option+S on Mac), the video pauses, an overlay appears, you drag-select the text you want, and it's on your clipboard. It works on YouTube, Udemy, Coursera, SharePoint, and most major video platforms.
What's good
- Preserves code indentation — huge for Python tutorials
- 50+ languages via modern OCR engines
- Keyboard-shortcut driven; minimal friction
- Actively maintained, recent updates
What's not
- Requires Google sign-in (privacy-sensitive users may dislike)
- Designed for video — not the best for static images or PDFs
- Free tier has usage limits before you hit paid
- Doesn't save what you've copied — it's still a clipboard tool
Project Naptha
Genuinely magical when it shipped in 2014. Genuinely showing its age in 2026.
Project Naptha takes a different approach from every other tool here: it doesn't ask you to capture or select a region. It just makes the text inside images on the page directly selectable, as if it were normal HTML text. You move your cursor over a block of words, the cursor changes to an I-beam, and you can highlight and copy as normal.
What's good
- Best-in-class UX for text inside already-loaded images
- Local detection — image data isn't routinely uploaded
- Can erase and translate text inside images (powerful, if buggy)
What's not
- Effectively unmaintained — last meaningful release years ago
- Struggles with smaller fonts, stylized typography, handwriting
- 3.6★ average reflects accumulated frustration; many recent reviews say “barely works”
- No mechanism for capture, save, or search
SnapIndex
The only Chrome extension here that thinks OCR is step two, not the whole product.
Every capture you take with SnapIndex — a screenshot, a full-page scrollshot, a saved PDF, or a multi-step workflow recording — is OCR'd automatically and added to a searchable index. The “find anything” experience matters more to us than the capture itself, because capture has been a solved problem for fifteen years and retrieval still isn't.
If you screenshot a chart in October and want to find it again in March by typing “Q3 revenue” into a search bar, that's the workflow SnapIndex is built for. None of the other tools on this page do this.
What's good
- Automatic OCR + full-text search across every capture you've ever made
- Annotation on top of captures (highlight, arrows, notes)
- Multi-page PDF export with text searchable across pages
- Sequence capture — records multi-step workflows for documentation
- Indexes screenshots and PDFs in the same library
What's not (yet)
- Newer extension — smaller user base than Copyfish or Selectext
- Overkill if you only OCR once a month
- Free tier exists; heavier use eventually means Pro
Image Reader (OCR)
The pick for “no cloud, no account, no data leaving my browser.”
Image Reader runs OCR locally using one of two engines. The default is Tesseract.js — the JavaScript port of Google's Tesseract engine, which runs entirely in your browser. The optional second engine is IBM's Granite Docling model, which downloads ~1.2GB of weights once and then also runs locally.
What's good
- Fully local processing — strong privacy story
- Granite engine gives surprisingly good results on documents
- No account, no sign-in
What's not
- Tesseract.js accuracy lags behind cloud OCR (Google, AWS, OCR.space)
- Granite engine is a 1.2GB download — heavy
- UI is functional, not polished
- No saving, no library — still a clipboard tool
Where SnapIndex isn't the right answer
We promised this near the top, so here it is in writing.
SnapIndex is the wrong choice if:
You OCR images maybe once a month. A persistent index is overhead you won't benefit from. Install Copyfish, grab the text, move on.
Your use case is video tutorials specifically. Selectext's video-paused-frame UX is faster than capturing a screenshot and then searching for it later.
You need OCR that absolutely cannot touch the cloud. Image Reader's local Tesseract.js path is the right architecture for that constraint.
You're batch-processing hundreds of scanned PDFs. No browser extension is the right tool — use ABBYY FineReader, Adobe Acrobat Pro, or a Tesseract CLI pipeline.
Where SnapIndex is the right answer is when you find yourself capturing the same kinds of things over and over — research, designs, dashboard states, error messages, receipts, reference material — and the friction isn't getting the text, it's finding it again. That's the problem we built around.
Frequently asked
What is the best free OCR Chrome extension?+
For one-off text grabs from images on a webpage, Copyfish is the most reliable free option with over 800,000 users and a 4.0+ rating. Project Naptha is a fully free alternative that works on existing in-page images, though it hasn't received significant updates in years. For video content specifically, Selectext is purpose-built and well-reviewed. SnapIndex has a free tier as well, and is the right choice if you want every capture saved and indexed automatically.
Which OCR extension works on YouTube videos?+
Selectext is designed specifically for video text extraction and works on YouTube, Udemy, Coursera and most major video platforms. It preserves code indentation, supports 50+ languages, and copies to clipboard with one click. Copyfish also works on paused videos via screen-region selection, but Selectext's UX is faster.
Is there an OCR Chrome extension that saves and indexes my captures?+
Most OCR extensions are “grab-and-copy” tools — they extract text to your clipboard and stop there. SnapIndex is the only Chrome extension we found that automatically saves, OCRs, and indexes every capture into a searchable library, so you can find any screenshot by the text inside it weeks later.
Does OCR work offline in Chrome extensions?+
It depends on the engine. Copyfish uses a cloud OCR API (online required). Project Naptha runs detection locally. Image Reader (OCR) offers a Tesseract.js mode that runs in-browser, and an IBM Granite Docling mode that downloads ~1.2GB of model data for offline use. Privacy-sensitive users should check each extension's data handling policy before installing.
Why doesn't Copyfish work on some images or PDFs?+
OCR accuracy depends heavily on input quality. Common failure modes for Copyfish reported by users include low-resolution images, stylized fonts, handwriting, vertical text scripts, and certain PDF viewers. Cropping tightly around the text (excluding icons and background patterns) typically improves results significantly.
Are these extensions safe to install?+
The extensions listed above are all featured on the Chrome Web Store and have established publisher records. The wider OCR extension category has a known long tail of clones, some of which have been flagged or removed for policy violations. Stick to extensions with substantial user bases, recent updates, and clear publisher information.
Capture it once. Find it forever.
If the pattern you keep running into is “I know I captured that — where is it?”, SnapIndex is the OCR extension built for that exact moment.