Five Surprising Things You Can Do With Windows Snips
Windows’ Snipping Tool is best known for its screenshot capabilities—after all, when you launch it from the Start menu, it prompts you to do just that. But Microsoft has packed a number of other unexpected and useful features into this program.
These extra features aren’t particularly well advertised or easy to access, so you’d be forgiven if you’ve never encountered them before. Open it using the Win+Shift+S keyboard shortcut or through the Start menu and check out what it can do.
Run an image search
If you want to know more about an image you captured, or any image on your system that you open in the Snipping Tool, you can use it to search for images online. This is useful for everything from shopping for groceries to finding information about attractions.
To try this out, open an image in Snipping Tool, click the three dots in the top right corner, then choose Visual Search with Bing . You’ll be redirected to the Microsoft search engine in your default browser, and from there you can click on any result to see more.
Extracting text from images
Snipping Tool also works well as an OCR (optical character recognition) program. Once the image is loaded on the screen, click the “Text Actions” button at the top (horizontal lines inside the frame) to identify the text in the image and make it selectable.
From here you can copy some or all of the text to the Windows clipboard and other programs – this is very useful, for example, if you need to extract text from receipts or documents. Click Quick Edit to ignore any text that contains email addresses and phone numbers.
Scan QR codes
Lifehacker has previously written about how scissors can turn into a QR code reader, although this is limited to QR codes embedded in images; you can’t scan the QR code you point your laptop’s webcam at (which is probably a good thing anyway).
The process is the same as for extracting text: open the image in Snipping Tool, then click on “Text Actions” (the button with the horizontal lines in the box), and as long as the image you’re dealing with has a QR code inside of it, you You will see a clickable link at the top.
Video and audio recording
This may be considered a screenshot feature, but it’s still worth mentioning: The Snipping Tool is a powerful video and audio recording tool, so you can use it to record everything that happens on your screen. Just click the “Camera” button, then the “+ New” button (both top right).
You have the option to record the entire screen or just a specific part of it (by dragging the edges of the selection box). During recording, a control panel appears at the top with options to turn on the system sound and microphone.
Edit images to add annotations or emojis
The Snipping Tool can also be a handy way to highlight and annotate your images—remember, you can open any image in the app, not just screenshots. Perhaps you want to highlight a key message in a text conversation, for example.
When you open an image inside the Snipping Tool, you’ll see four buttons in the top toolbar: the pen, marker, eraser, and the Shapes tool (which also lets you add emoji). Click once to select a tool, then click the button again to open its options.