How to copy text from an image or screenshot, on any device
Mac, iPhone, Windows, Android and Chrome all have text recognition built in now. Here's where it is on each, and how to make it actually accurate.
Your phone and your laptop can already read text in pictures. Most people don’t know where the button is. Here’s every one of them.
Mac
Since macOS Monterey, Macs have Live Text.
- Open the image or screenshot in Preview or Photos.
- Move your cursor over the text. It turns into a text cursor.
- Drag to select, then ⌘ + C.
It also works on images in Safari, and in Quick Look (select a file in Finder, press Space). To grab text from something on screen, take a screenshot with ⌘ + Shift + 4, open it in Preview and select away.
iPhone and iPad
Also Live Text, since iOS 15.
- Open the photo or screenshot in Photos.
- Press and hold on the text, or tap the Live Text button (the little box with lines, bottom right).
- Tap Copy, or Copy All.
It works in the Camera too: point it at a menu or a sign, tap the Live Text button, and copy without taking a photo.
Windows
- Snipping Tool on Windows 11: take a snip (Windows + Shift + S), open it, click Text actions, then Copy all text. It can also blur out emails and phone numbers before you share it, which is handy.
- PowerToys Text Extractor: if you’ve installed Microsoft’s free PowerToys, press Windows + Shift + T, drag a box over any text on screen, and it’s copied. The fastest option on Windows by a mile.
Android
Google Lens, which is built into most Android phones.
- Open the image in Google Photos.
- Tap Lens.
- Tap Text, select what you want, then Copy text.
On a Pixel, you can also do it straight from the screenshot preview, or from the recent apps screen.
Chrome, on any computer
Right-click an image on any web page and pick Search image with Google (older versions call it Search with Google Lens). A panel opens on the side. Click Text, select, copy. Works on Mac, Windows, Linux and ChromeOS.
Making it accurate
Text recognition is very good on clean screenshots and a lot worse on everything else. What helps:
- Crop first. Less stuff around the text means fewer mistakes.
- Bigger is better. A zoomed-in screenshot beats a tiny one. On a phone, zoom in before you screenshot.
- Contrast. Light grey text on white is where most tools give up.
- Straight on. For photos of paper, hold the phone flat above it, not at an angle.
- Handwriting works on neat handwriting and not much else.
If you do this a lot
If you’re copying text out of screenshots every day, what you probably actually want is to never have to. Every screenshot you save being searchable by the words in it, without you doing anything.
That’s what Savepad does with every image, screenshot and scanned PDF you save. It runs OCR (Tesseract, on our own servers, nothing sent to a third party) so searching “SSO add-on” finds the pricing table you grabbed four months ago. It’s the one bit of recognition we allow in a product with no AI in it, because without it a swipe file of screenshots is a pile of pictures.
And if your screenshot folder is its own problem, there’s a post on how to organize screenshots on a Mac.