Microsoft pulls text recognition from Photos app preview

Microsoft has disabled the OCR functionality in its updated Photos app to "address some issues."

A Windows Insider preview of the Photos app was released in October, which introduced super-resolution for Copilot+ PCs – using AI to enlarge an image up to eight times its original size – and adding Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract text from photos on Windows 11 and Windows 10 PCs.

Microsoft has had OCR functionality in its apps for some time. It's a genuinely helpful feature in OneNote, particularly when lifting printed text from a picture (such as a receipt or business card).

The Text Extractor feature in Power Toys is also handy when copying text from a picture or video – hit a simple key combination, draw a capture area, and see what appears in the clipboard. As with all OCR technologies, the text that appears might be utter nonsense, and a quick proofread is ...