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Copy Paste Any Text Instantly - Indie app of the day

Today's indie app of the day is called Copy Paste Any Text Instantly. The app does pretty much what the title says, including grabbing words from photos!
By
April 9, 2014

What is Copy Paste Any Text Instantly?

Copy Paste Any Text Instantly is probably the most descriptive name the developer could have chosen. When using pretty much any device, you can copy and paste plain text. It’s just a matter of long pressing until the editor comes up, highlighting the appropriate text, and then hitting the copy button. Where this app differs is that it can grab text from pretty much anything including images which is a little more difficult to copy and paste.

Here’s how it works. You take a screenshot of whatever text you want to copy. In your gallery app of choice, you open the screenshot and click share. You then choose Copy Paste Any Text Instantly. This opens the app and from there you just crop the image until the text you want to copy is visible. Finish out and the text that was cropped becomes copied to your clipboard for future pasting.

Of course, the question now becomes in what situations would this app be useful? There are actually quite a bit. Many images have quotes that people would like to copy somewhere. There are many graphics, infographics, etc that have data that would be useful to copy and paste. You can even grab text off of images in other languages so you can paste it into Google Translate to see what the caption says.

It’s also worth noting that you don’t need to use strictly screenshots. You can use any picture on your camera roll that contain words. So this app could also be useful for travelers or people who wondered in to that French restaurant in town and can’t read the menus. It happens. The app uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to tell what is text that can be copied and what isn’t.

In terms of sheer functionality, that’s really it. It’s a simple, easy app that hides in the background until you need it. There is a trial version with the full version being $1.49USD.

What’s wrong with this app?

One of my favorite things about this app is how the developer actually puts what’s wrong with this app in the Google Play description. The biggest issue is Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text don’t paste very well all the time so you may have trouble with that. The developer also notes that URLs don’t copy particularly well. Aside from that, there is the small issue that whatever image you use will remain on your device until you delete it manually. Aside from the occasional bug or messed up copy, the app works fairly well.


Final thoughts

Copy Paste Any Text Instantly is one of those apps that you really can’t appreciate until you need it for something. Then again, there are a lot of people who may never need an app like this. It’s definitely a niche product that is only useful every now and then so there are many who may not be able to justify the expenditure. That said, it does do what it claims to be able to do with fewer bugs and issues than most of the competition. So if you ever find that you need a service that copies text from pretty much anywhere, this is definitely a good app to start with. Click the button below to see it in the Play Store.