OCR, optical character recognition, is the step that turns a picture of words into words you can edit, search and paste. It used to mean a scanner, a bundled app and a lot of patience. On a modern Mac it runs in a fraction of a second, on the machine itself.
What your Mac does on its own
macOS ships with Live Text. According to Apple’s guides, you can select and copy text in photos and images in Photos, Preview and Safari, then look it up, translate it, or act on phone numbers, email addresses and links it finds. It’s free and already there. Apple notes that it isn’t available in every region or language.
Live Text works inside the apps that support it. That covers a lot of everyday cases, like a photo of a receipt or an image on a web page, but not text inside a video call, a design tool, a game, or most third-party apps. For those you need something that reads the screen itself.
Three kinds of OCR tools
Document OCR
Built for paperwork: turning a 200-page scan into a searchable PDF, batch-processing a folder of invoices, keeping page layout. If that’s your job, use a document OCR tool. A screen OCR app isn’t trying to do this.
Online OCR websites
Upload an image, get text back. Handy on a borrowed computer, but you’re sending the image to someone else’s server. For contracts, medical letters, internal dashboards or anything from a work meeting, that’s a real trade-off.
Screen OCR utilities
A shortcut, a drag, and the text is on your clipboard. These are for the moment you’re looking at text you can’t select: a paused video, a screen share, a screenshot in a chat, an error dialog. Snatch is one of these.
Why on-device matters
Apple’s Vision framework does text recognition locally, using your Mac’s own hardware. Apps built on it, including Snatch, never need to send your screen anywhere to read it. That means:
- Privacy. What you capture stays on your Mac. Snatch’s recognition works with Wi-Fi switched off.
- Speed. No upload and no waiting on a server, so short selections come back almost instantly.
- Languages. Vision supports around 30 languages on recent versions of macOS. Snatch can detect the language automatically or use the one you pick.
How Snatch does OCR
Snatch sits in your menu bar and does one job well: whatever is on screen, wherever it is, into your clipboard.
- Press ⌘ ⇧ 2, or a shortcut you choose.
- Drag over the text. Only that region is read.
- Paste. A small toast confirms how many characters were copied.
Around that core there are a few things that make it a daily tool rather than an occasional one:
- QR codes and barcodes are decoded, and QR links can open automatically if you turn that on.
- Clipboard images and files. Read an image you already copied, or open a PNG, JPEG or PDF.
- Searchable history with filters for text, links and QR codes. Click any item to copy it again.
- Accurate or fast mode, and a choice to keep or join line breaks.
- A URL scheme (
snatch://capture,snatch://clipboard) so Raycast, Alfred or a Shortcuts “Open URL” action can trigger a capture.
Getting accurate results from any OCR
- Bigger is better. Zoom in before capturing. Tiny text is where every OCR engine struggles.
- Contrast helps. Dark text on a light background reads best. Busy backgrounds and low-contrast themes cause misses.
- Select tightly. Leave out icons, avatars and UI chrome so they don’t turn into stray characters.
- Proofread numbers. Account numbers, codes and passwords deserve a second look.
So which should you use?
For images already open in Photos, Preview or Safari, Live Text is built in and free. For big scanning jobs, a document OCR tool. For everything else you see on screen, every day, a screen OCR utility saves the most time. Snatch is that, for macOS Sonoma and later: on-device, a one-time $5.99, with a 14-day money-back guarantee.