With the substantial development of photoelectric technologies, some transparent materials with the better performances as information transmission media are required. Transparent polycrystalline ceramics are widely used as missile fairings, lamp envelopes of high-pressure sodium lamps, transparent armors, gain medium for lasers, and laser-driven white lightings due to their excellent mechanical, thermal, optical and electrical properties. Various sintering technologies are employed to prepare transparency ceramics, such as high-vacuum sintering, hot-pressing sintering, hot isostatic pressing sintering and spark plasma sintering. However, their complex preparation process and the resultant high cost greatly restrict their actual applications. The full crystallization of the mother glass induced by heat-treating at crystallization temperatures was proposed to obtain transparent ceramics, which had attracted much attention due to its relatively simple, time-saving, and low-cost. This review summarized recent progress and potential applications on transparent ceramics prepared by a glass-crystallization method.