🗂️Keep in Mind Five Unexpected Things You Can Do With Windows’ Snipping Tool

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The Windows Snipping Tool is best known for its screenshot-taking capabilities—after all, when you launch it from the Start menu, that's what it invites you to do. But Microsoft has packed a number of other unexpected, useful functions into this program.

These extra features aren't particularly well-advertised nor easy to access, so you'll be forgiven if you've never come across them before. Open it via 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've captured—or any image on your system that you open up in the Snipping Tool—you can use it to run an image search on the internet. It's helpful for everything from shopping for products to looking up info about landmarks.

To try it, open an image in Snipping Tool, click the three dots in the top right corner, then choose Visual Search with Bing. You'll be directed to Microsoft's search engine in your default browser, and from there you can click through on any result to see more.

Extract text from images​

Extracting text from an image. Credit: Lifehacker

The Snipping Tool also works well as an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program. With a picture loaded up on screen, click the Text actions button at the top (the horizontal lines inside a frame) to identify text in an image and make it available to highlight.

From there you can copy some or all of the text to the Windows clipboard and other programs—very handy if you need to pull text out of receipts or documents, for example. Click Quick redact to ignore any text containing email addresses and phone numbers.

Scan QR codes​

Lifehacker has written before about how the Snipping Tool can turn itself into a QR code reader, though this is limited to QR codes embedded in images; you can't scan a QR code that you've pointing your laptop's webcam at (which is probably for the best anyway).

The process is the same as it is for text extraction: Open the image in the Snipping Tool, then click Text actions (the button with horizontal lines in a frame), and as long as the image you're dealing with has a QR code inside it, you'll see a clickable link appear on top.

Record video and audio​

Switch to movie mode to record clips. Credit: Lifehacker

This perhaps counts as a screenshot feature, but it's still worth mentioning: The Snipping Tool is a capable video and audio recorder, so you can use it to record whatever's going on your screen. Just click the movie camera button then the + New button (both top right).

You have the option of recording the entirety of the screen, or just a particular section of it (by dragging the edges of the selection window). When the recording is in progress, a control bar appears at the top with options for including system and microphone audio.

Editing images to add annotations or emoji​

The Snipping Tool can also be a handy way to add highlights and annotations to your pictures—remember, you can open any image in the app, not just screenshots. Maybe you want to highlight the key message in a text conversation, for example.

With an image open inside the Snipping Tool, you'll see four buttons on the top toolbar: the pen, the highlighter, the eraser, and the shapes tool (which also lets you drop in emojis). Click once to select a tool, then click the button again to bring up its options.
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