How to Copy Text From an Image or Screenshot on a Mac

A screenshot of an error message, a photo of a whiteboard, a scanned receipt: the words are right there, but you can't copy them the way you'd copy a document. Except you can. macOS recognises text in images on your Mac and lets you select it like any other text.

Copy text with Live Text

1. Open the image in Preview or Photos, or select it in Finder and press Space to open Quick Look.
2. Move the pointer over the text in the image. It changes to a text cursor when macOS has found text there.
3. Drag to select the words you want (double-click a word, triple-click a line).
4. Press ⌘ C, or Control-click and choose Copy.

Then paste it anywhere with ⌘ V. In Quick Look and Preview you'll sometimes see a small Live Text button in the corner of the image; clicking it highlights all the recognised text so you can select it at once.

Where it works

• Preview: images and scanned PDFs
• Photos: including photos of signs, labels and documents
• Quick Look: any image in Finder, without opening an app
• Safari: text in images on web pages

Requirements: Live Text arrived in macOS Monterey (12). If you can't select text in an image, update macOS and check that Live Text is switched on under System Settings → General → Language & Region.

Copy text from a screenshot in two steps

1. Take the screenshot as normal (⇧ ⌘ 4).
2. Click the floating thumbnail that appears, or open the file with Quick Look, and select the text.

If you do this often, a dedicated "capture text" tool saves a step: you drag over part of the screen and the recognised text goes straight onto the clipboard, with no image in between. Apps such as TextSniper do this. If what you really want is to find the screenshot again later, read on.

Tips for better recognition

• Zoom in before you capture. Larger text is recognised far more reliably than small or blurry text.
• Straighten photos. Text photographed at a steep angle or on a curved page is harder to read. Crop and rotate in Photos first.
• Check numbers. Recognition can confuse similar characters (0 and O, 1 and l). Double-check codes, amounts and passwords before you use them.
• Handwriting varies. Neat print often works; joined-up handwriting often doesn't.

Find a screenshot by the text inside it

Copying text from one image is easy. Finding the right image among hundreds of screenshots named by date and time is the harder problem.

EasyPaste solves it by running the same kind of on-device recognition (Apple's Vision framework) on every screenshot and copied image in your history, in the background. Search for "refund", a product name or part of an error message, and the screenshots containing those words come up, even if you never opened them. Nothing is uploaded; the recognition happens on your Mac.

To search across many images at once rather than copying from one, see how to search for text inside images on a Mac.

Frequently asked questions

Can I copy text from a PDF that's just a scan?

Yes. Open the scanned PDF in Preview and Live Text lets you select the words on the page image just as it does in a photo.

Does Live Text send my images to Apple?

Live Text recognition runs on your Mac. Features that look things up online, like searching the web for a recognised term, only send what you choose to look up.

Why can't I select text in an image?

The app may not support Live Text (try Preview or Quick Look), the text may be too small or stylised to recognise, or Live Text may be turned off in Language & Region settings.