If you're on macOS 12 or iOS 15, you can also use the built in live text functionality in Safari, Preview or Photos

True but that only applies to images displayed using the standard image library. TextSniper will capture text from any text displayed on screen, not just within an image. I use it often to pull text from things shared in Zoom. You can do it with the built-in Livetext but you have to do a screen shot, them bring that up in preview to get the text OCRd. TextSniper makes it a single operation.

This only works on M1~ macs. Intel mac don't have OCR for some Apple-ish reason

When the beta containing Live Text was first released it was M1 only but by the time it was released, Intel support was included. A lot of people only remember the first impression.

It does work on Intel Macs. I've used it plenty of times.

Similar tool, but open source - https://github.com/amebalabs/TRex

I use macOCR[1] from the terminal for that.

[1]: https://github.com/schappim/macOCR

You can also easily stitch something like that together yourself.

After `brew install pngpaste tesseract` (the latter is a dependency of the great OCRmyPDF tool btw), you can set `alias ocr="pngpaste - | tesseract -c debug_file=/dev/null stdin stdout | pbcopy; pbpaste"`.

I like having this alias better than macOCR because the workflow feels more ergonomic: You first cmd + shift + 4 to select text and then type `ocr` with the result being printed to stdout and being saved in your clipboard. With macOCR I have to go to the terminal first to initiate the process, then go back to what I want to screenshot etc.

For linux (or GNOME more specifically) there is Frog[1]. It uses Tesseract OCR[2] under the hood.

[1]: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.tenderowl.frog

[2]: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract

There's a bunch of similar tools on Windows, usually for machine translating video games that haven't been localized.

eg https://github.com/Artikash/Textractor

Yeah, this tool has become indispensable for me.