Copy text from an image
on your Mac.

Images don’t contain text the way a document does. They contain pixels that happen to look like letters, so before you can copy anything, something has to read those pixels and turn them back into characters. That’s optical character recognition, or OCR, and your Mac can already do it. The question is how many steps you want between seeing the text and pasting it.

1. Use Live Text in Preview or Photos

If the image is a file on your Mac, Live Text is the quickest built-in route. It’s part of macOS and costs nothing.

1. Open the image in Preview (or in Photos, if it’s in your library).
2. Hold the pointer over the text you want.
3. Drag to select the text, Control-click the selection, and choose Copy Text.
4. Paste it wherever you need it.

If Preview won’t let you select anything, choose Tools → Text Selection first. Apple notes that Live Text isn’t available in every region or language, so it’s worth checking if the cursor never changes.

Good for: images you already have as files. Less good for: anything that isn’t open in an app that supports Live Text, like a picture inside a chat window or a design tool.

2. Screenshot first, then use Live Text

When the image is only on screen, inside a website, a Slack thread or a slide deck, you can turn it into a file and then use method 1.

1. Press ⌃ ⇧ ⌘ 4 and drag over the text. Holding Control sends the screenshot to the clipboard instead of the desktop.
2. In Preview, choose File → New from Clipboard.
3. Select the text with Live Text and copy it, as above.

It works, and it’s free. It’s also four or five steps for a single sentence, and if you forget the Control key you end up with a desktop full of screenshots.

3. Use Snatch: one shortcut, straight to the clipboard

Snatch is a small menu bar app built for exactly this. It uses the same on-device Apple Vision text recognition, but skips the detour through a file.

1. Press ⌘ ⇧ 2. Your cursor becomes a crosshair.
2. Drag over the text in the image, wherever it is on screen.
3. Let go. The text is already on your clipboard, and a small toast tells you how many characters were copied.

Two more ways in, for images that aren’t on screen yet:

• From clipboard. If you’ve already copied an image, choose From clipboard in the Snatch menu and it reads that image directly.
• Open image. Pick a PNG, JPEG or PDF file and Snatch reads the text in it.

Every capture also goes into a searchable history in the menu bar panel, so you can copy something again an hour later without capturing it twice. If the image is a QR code or barcode, Snatch reads the code instead of the pixels around it.

Tips for cleaner results

• Make it bigger first. OCR is far more accurate on large, sharp text. Zoom the image to 100% or more before you capture.
• Pick the right language. Snatch detects the language automatically, but you can set one in Settings if a mixed-language image confuses it.
• Use accurate mode for small or dense text. Fast mode is quicker for big, clear headlines.
• Decide on line breaks. Keep them for addresses, lists and code. Turn them off when you want a paragraph to paste as one flowing block.
• Double-check look-alikes. In serial numbers and passwords, 0 and O or 1 and l can trade places.

Which method should you use?

If you copy text from an image once in a while and the image is already a file, Live Text in Preview is all you need. If it happens several times a day, or the text lives inside apps, videos and screen shares rather than files, a shortcut that goes straight to the clipboard saves real time. That’s what Snatch is for, and it’s a one-time $5.99 with a 14-day money-back guarantee.