How to Copy Text From an Image on Mac (Live Text)

That phone number trapped in a screenshot isn't trapped. macOS reads the text inside images — screenshots, photos, scans, even paused video frames — and lets you select it like any other text. The feature is called Live Text, it's built into Preview, Photos, Quick Look, and Safari, and on macOS Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia it's on by default.

Copy text from any image

1. Open the image — double-click it to open Preview, open it in Photos, or just select the file in Finder and press Space for Quick Look. All three do Live Text.
2. Move your pointer over the text in the image. The cursor changes from an arrow to an I-beam — that's Live Text telling you it recognized something.
3. Drag across the text to select it, exactly as if it were a web page. Double-click selects a word; Cmd+A grabs everything recognized in the image.
4. Press Cmd+C and paste wherever you need it.

Right-click the selection for more than copying: Look Up, Translate, and web search all work on image text. Data detectors ride along too — hover over a phone number, address, or URL in a photo and macOS underlines it so you can call, map, or open it directly.

Where Live Text works

• Preview and Quick Look — the two you'll use most. A screenshot lands on your desktop, you tap Space, and the text is selectable without opening anything else.
• Photos — including text in paused video frames on macOS Ventura and later: pause the video on the frame with the text and select it.
• Safari — text inside images on web pages is selectable. If a site posts a flyer as a JPEG, you can still copy the date and address out of it.
• Screenshot previews — take a screenshot, click the floating thumbnail, and select text right in the markup window.

Recognition handles printed and reasonably neat handwritten text, and understands multiple languages — macOS picks the language automatically, and accuracy is best with sharp, well-lit source images.

If selecting does nothing

Check that Live Text is actually on: System Settings → General → Language & Region, then make sure the Live Text toggle at the bottom is enabled. That's the only switch — there's no Terminal command for this one. If it's on and a specific image still won't select, the text is probably too small or low-contrast; zoom into the image first (Live Text re-scans at the new size), or take a tighter screenshot of just the text region.

One format worth understanding: a scanned PDF is really a stack of images, and Preview treats each page with the same Live Text engine — so you can usually select and copy from scans that were never OCR'd. The selection isn't searchable with Cmd+F, though, because the PDF itself still contains no text layer; Live Text reads what's on screen rather than editing the file. If you need a searchable archive, copy the recognized text out and keep it alongside the scan.

The screenshot-to-text workflow

Once this clicks, the fastest OCR on the Mac is: Shift+Cmd+4, drag over anything on screen — an error dialog, a code snippet in a video, a serial number — then press Space on the new file in Finder and copy the text out. Two keystrokes and a drag, no apps, no upload to some OCR website. It works on anything your screen can display, which makes it the universal escape hatch for "I can see the text but I can't select it."

Take it one step further

If the text you need is on paper rather than on screen, skip the photo shuffle: scan documents with your iPhone directly into the Mac — the scan arrives as a PDF and Live Text reads that too.