Welcome to Prompt, Tinker, Innovate, my AI playground. Each edition gives you one hands-on experiment and the prompt to run it.
This week's playground: Turning any image into usable text
You know that folder. The one with 400 screenshots in it. A slide from someone's webinar deck. An infographic you saved off LinkedIn because it had a stat you wanted. A photo of a whiteboard from a meeting three weeks ago. A chart from a PDF that won't let you copy anything out of it.
All of that content is trapped. It's not searchable, you can't quote it, you can't pull the data into a doc, you can't ask questions about it. So it just sits there. You scroll past it. You forget why you saved it in the first place.
I will be honest. This is one of the most-used, least-discussed things I do with AI. Multiple times a day. Not because it's flashy. Because it's the fastest way to unstick information that's stuck in picture form.
Use case spotlight: where this actually shows up
- Someone's presenting a slide on a webinar and you want the exact framework, not your rushed paraphrase of it
- An infographic on social has a stat or list you want to reference later
- A whiteboard photo from a brainstorm that needs to become an actual doc
- A chart in a PDF report that you need as a table, not a picture
- A handwritten note you need typed up so you can actually search it later
In every one of these, the image is fine. What you actually want is the text inside it.
Your AI experiment: Try this prompt
👉 Time to tinker: Grab one image sitting in your camera roll or downloads folder right now—a screenshot, a slide, an infographic, whatever's been sitting there untouched. Upload it to your favorite AI tool.
📝 Prompt:
Extract all the text from this image exactly as it appears. Keep the original structure (headers, bullet points, numbered lists) so I can use it directly. If there's any data in a chart or table, put it into a clean table format instead of just describing it.
💡 Pro tips: Don't stop at extraction
- Add "then summarize the 3 most important points" if you're trying to remember why you saved it
- Add "then turn this into a LinkedIn post in my voice" if it's something worth sharing
- Add "then reformat this as a checklist I can actually use" if it's a process or framework
The extraction is step one. What you do with the text afterward is where the real time savings show up.
What did you discover?
Go find your most cluttered screenshot folder. Pick the one image you saved but never actually used. Run it through this prompt and see what was hiding in there.
What did you find that you'd forgotten about? Drop it in the comments—I want to see what's been sitting in your camera roll.
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