Phone Link for Windows will let you copy text from your Android phone’s photos

Credit: Robert Triggs / Android Authority

You’ll soon be able to use Phone Link to copy text from your Android phone’s photos, allowing you to use it in Windows 11.
This should be faster than using the Snipping Tool’s text functionality.
The feature is only available in Windows 11 preview builds right now, but it should be available in stable Windows 11 soon.

Windows recently gained optical character recognition (OCR) tech via the Snipping Tool, allowing you to grab text from images and paste it into the app of your choosing. What if you want to grab text from your phone photos and use it on your computer, though? Well, you could copy those photos to your PC first, or you could use this new Phone Link feature.

Windows Central spotted OCR functionality in the Phone Link app (h/t: The Verge) on Windows 11. The feature shows up as a “text” icon when viewing your phone’s snaps in the Photos section of Phone Link. Tapping the icon will initiate character recognition, and you can then select specific text, highlight all text, or copy all text.