You took a dozen screenshots during a research session — pricing tables, feature comparisons, settings panels, reference material. Now you need the text from all of them. With traditional OCR tools, that means opening each file individually, running recognition, copying the output, pasting it somewhere, and repeating. Twelve screenshots means twelve cycles of file-open-process-copy-paste. It's not hard — just tediously slow.
macOS Offers No Batch Text Extraction
There's no built-in macOS feature that lets you select multiple images and extract text from all of them. Preview can open multiple files but has no "extract all text" function. Automator and Shortcuts can chain some actions together but lack reliable OCR capabilities for screen captures. You're either processing each image manually or installing heavy-duty document processing software meant for enterprise scanning workflows.
The irony is that you captured these screenshots quickly — Cmd+Shift+4, click, done — but extracting the text from them takes ten times longer than capturing them did.
Rapid-Fire Screen OCR with Built-In History
Optic turns batch extraction into a fast, linear workflow. Open your screenshots in Quick Look or any viewer, then make rapid selections — drag over the text in one image, move to the next, drag again. Each extraction is instantly saved to Optic's capture history in the menu bar. No file management, no save dialogs, no copy-paste juggling between windows.
Research Sessions
Captured screenshots from competitor websites, pricing pages, or documentation? Open them in sequence and fire off extractions. Your capture history becomes a clean text log of everything you gathered — searchable and re-copyable without reopening any images.
Capture History as Your Text Archive
Every extraction is timestamped and stored in the menu bar dropdown. After processing a batch of screenshots, scroll through the history to review, re-copy, or verify individual captures. The history functions as a lightweight text archive of your extracted content.
Selective Extraction
Unlike automated batch OCR that processes entire images, you control exactly which portion of each screenshot to extract. Need just the price from a pricing table? Just the error code from a log screenshot? Select precisely what matters and skip the rest.