Just launched my free macOS OCR app Ghost Text on Product Hunt 🚀
Hey folks 👋
I just launched my side project Ghost Text on Product Hunt today!
It’s a free macOS app that lets you copy text from places where you normally can't like screenshots, videos, or scanned PDFs. Basically, anywhere text is “stuck” as an image, Ghost Text makes it selectable.
I built it because I kept running into those annoying moments when I wanted to grab a piece of text but ended up retyping it manually 😅
Would love if you could check it out and share any feedback — design, UX, features I should add, anything. Here’s the launch page: Product Hunt
If you like the idea, an upvote on PH would mean the world 🙏 but more importantly, I’m looking to learn from your thoughts and improve the app.
Thanks!
Ghost Text
Congrats on the launch. Ghost Text looks like a super handy free macOS OCR app. Just checked it out on Product Hunt. Wishing you lots of votes and success.
How about windows?
i will soon launch for windows
Great news!
I run into that all the time with screenshots or scanned docs. Just gave it a try and it works smoothly - feels like one of those tools you don’t realize you need until you use it.
Exactly! That was the goal to make it super seamless for those everyday moments where you don’t even think you’ll need it, but it saves you time instantly. Glad it worked smoothly for you
Yeah, that makes sense, I didn't realize how much time I was wasting until I tried it. It's those little tasks that sneak up and pile on, so having something that just works without thinking about it really does make a difference
Is not macOS supporting it natively? Was sure that latest versions do it by drfault
macOS does have Live Text for images, but it’s limited to certain apps and formats. This tool works anywhere screenshots, PDFs, apps with locked text so you’re not restricted to where Apple supports it
Is the OCR fully on-device (Apple Vision vs Tesseract), and how do you handle privacy for screenshots? Also, any plans for a global shortcut and batch/continuous capture from video frames?
Global shortcut support is on the way (I’ve been experimenting with making it system-wide, rather than just the menu trigger). Batch/continuous capture from video frames is also on the roadmap, which I see as being extremely useful for people dealing with lectures, tutorials, or meetings.
Nice - system-wide shortcut would be clutch. For video, a continuous capture mode with a 0.5–2s interval and "append to clipboard/document" would save tons of copy steps.
Btw, I got an offer for you that will benefit both of us. I am developing a social network for entrepreneurs and will be launching a closed beta in 19 days, and if you would register in the waitlist, and just tell people the story of your project in a post format, we could boost it so more people will know about Ghost Text!
You get: more users
We get: an entrepreneur on board
Looks cool! I’ve seen tools that let you copy text from PDFs ...... keen to know how Ghost Text is different. Does it also handle things like grabbing text from YouTube videos or screenshots on the fly?
Yes it does
Voted
thanks buddy
Congrats on the launch. OCR tools always sound niche until you realize how often you need them, and having it baked right into macOS with a clean UX is super handy. Just tried it on a screenshot and it worked perfectly.