Screenshot OCR

A Bash script that watches a directory for new screenshots, extracts text using Tesseract OCR, and copies both the text and image to the clipboard.

Features

• Watches the ~/Pictures/Screenshots directory for .png files.
• Extracts text from new screenshots with Tesseract.
• Copies the text to the clipboard.
• Restores the image to the clipboard after copying text.

Requirements

• tesseract-ocr
• inotify-tools
• xclip

Adding to Startup Applications

To run the script on startup in Ubuntu, there are plenty of ways to do it—but let’s be honest, my lazy a** went with this one:

1. Open the "Startup Applications" tool from the GUI.

2. Add a new entry with the following command:

   /usr/bin/bash -c "sleep 15 && ~/screenshot_ocr.sh&"

   this works and I’m good with it.

   Notes

• WATCH_DIR variable should be changed to screenshot directory.
• This repo is more of a backup than anything. I might swap Tesseract for PaddleOCR or experiment with other OCR services if I ever feel like it. But for now, it’s just chilling here, doing its job.