In late October 2024, Microsoft announced a big update for the Photos app for Windows 11 with two new major features: Super Resolution and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). After a month of testing, the company is hitting the brakes on the latter to address "some issues."
Brandon LeBlanc from the Windows Insider Program team posted on his X that the feature was taken down. The original announcement post was also updated with a short message:
UPDATE 11/21: OCR support in the Photos app has been temporarily disabled to address some issues and will be re-enabled again in a future update.
Interestingly, this is not the first hiccup with this update. Just a few days after the initial release, Microsoft confirmed that Super Resolution incorrectly appeared on PCs that should not be compatible with the feature. The upscaler is an exclusive feature for Copilot+ PCs with Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, but some insiders with traditional x86 processors received it as well.
Unlike Super Resolution in the Photos app, Optical Character Recognition in the Photos app does not require a processor with a dedicated NPU—it works on any Windows 11-compatible computer with Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm processors. The feature supports over 160 languages, allowing users to copy handwritten or printed text on images with a single click.
Despite the feature rollback, something that is hardly a surprise considering the nature of the Insider program, Windows 11 users are not left dead in the waters. If you need to extract text from a picture, there are still built-in tools to do that. You can copy some text without installing third-party apps using the Snipping Tool app: just take a screenshot with the Win + Shift + S shortcut and press the "Text actions." Alternatively, you can use the Text Extractor module in PowerToys, which works on Windows 10 and 11.