--- title: "How to copy text from an image or screenshot, on any device" description: "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." source: https://savepad.app/blog/copy-text-from-image --- [Blog](https://savepad.app/blog) · 19 March 2025 # 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. *A Savepad search matching words inside a screenshot, with the matched text highlighted* 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**. 1. Open the image or screenshot in **Preview** or **Photos**. 2. Move your cursor over the text. It turns into a text cursor. 3. 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. 1. Open the photo or screenshot in **Photos**. 2. Press and hold on the text, or tap the Live Text button (the little box with lines, bottom right). 3. 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](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/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. 1. Open the image in **Google Photos**. 2. Tap **Lens**. 3. 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 *A screenshot of a pricing table with an SSO add-on* 0826 · screenshot · text found *A screenshot of an Instagram story from a coffee brand* 0923 · screenshot · text found *A screenshot of a slide with a weekly retention chart* 0120 · screenshot · text found Three screenshots in a swipe file, all searchable by their text: a pricing table, an Instagram story and a slide from a conference talk. 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](https://savepad.app/philosophy), 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](https://savepad.app/blog/organize-screenshots-mac). [Join the waitlist](https://savepad.app/#waitlist) ## Read these next - [How to organize screenshots on a Mac (and get them off your desktop): Move screenshots out of your desktop, name them sensibly, sort the backlog, and make them searchable by what's in them. Settings, shortcuts and two Terminal lines.](https://savepad.app/blog/organize-screenshots-mac) - [How to take a full-page screenshot in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge: Capture a whole web page, top to footer, without an extension. The hidden menu in every browser, plus the iPhone trick nobody knows about.](https://savepad.app/blog/full-page-screenshot) - [How to find out what font a website is using: Three ways to identify a website's font in under a minute: your browser's DevTools, an extension, or a font matcher for images. Plus what to do once you've found it.](https://savepad.app/blog/find-website-font)