ICU OCR: Piping the text (and ideas) in images into WorkFlowy

One of the best things about WorkFlowy is how it gives you a simple, infinite canvas for your ideas. But what about the useful bits and pieces that aren’t already in WorkFlowy?

• A screenshot you just captured of a fleeting error message
• A comic strip embedded in a page you have no idea how you ended up on
• The design ideas locked into an image that captures your attention

There are ideas locked in images. Everywhere.

That’s where the ICU OCR Chromium extension comes in:

With a quick drag-and-drop, ICU OCR reads text (and visuals) from images, screenshots, or GIFs — and exactly like a genie let out of a bottle, pipes your wishes right into any WorkFlowy list(s) of your choice.

In the olden days

We’ve all dropped miscellaneous screenshots and images into our LLMs of choice in an attempt to “quickly” extract the text therein, or get an explanation of the contents of the image. We just wanted a quick hit-and-run, but we had to:

1. Switch contexts and open up our LLM
2. Drag our image in
3. Copy the results
4. Delete the conversation (because that’s all there was to it)
5. Optionally store the OCRed information elsewhere for a rainy day
6. And what about the image? How do we reference the image again??

Now that there’s you »

Now that we have the ICU OCR Chromium extension…

No matter the web page you’re on, you can screenshot or drag an image into any custom drop zone you’ve set up — directly on the page.

At the drop of a hat, drop zones can be configured to:

• Give you the exact output format that you want
• Repeat any creative workflow you have in mind
• Send your OCRed results to any WorkFlowy list of your choice

The result will also be copied to your clipboard — ready to go.

… and you’re actually still using your LLM of choice. Just that now you’ve got a smarter, repeatable workflow.

Build something useful and/ or cool

I used WorkFlowy’s recently announced API to set up the send-to-WorkFlowy part of the flow. I’m finding it to be rather helpful.

This OCR tool is just one of many, many extensions and integrations that are begging to be brought into existence.

ICU OCR isn’t the end goal of this post — it’s a nudge. The WorkFlowy API is open for the community. We’d love to see what you create. It could be a small script. It could be a browser extension. It could be something we haven’t imagined yet.

If you build it, share it with us! We’ll very likely showcase it.

Go ahead and install the ICU OCR Chromium extension.