Extract text from an image on a Mac, no extra app required

Someone sends a screenshot of a phone number, a friend photographs a page from a book, or a client drops in a slide from a deck you cannot open, and retyping it all by hand feels like the wrong decade for it. The useful thing to know is that macOS has been able to read text straight out of an ordinary picture since 2021, under the name Live Text, and it is on by default. Nothing to install, nothing to switch on first.

Live Text works inside four places most people already have open most days: Preview, Quick Look, Photos and Safari. The mechanics are close enough across all four that learning one teaches you the rest.

Where does Live Text actually work?

Live Text reads text in a photo, a screenshot, a scanned document or a picture sitting on a web page, inside Preview, Quick Look, Photos, Safari and the Screenshot app (Shift-Command-5), in every language macOS supports. It looks at the pixels the way a person glancing over your shoulder would, so it copes with a phone photo of a whiteboard almost as well as a clean PNG of an invoice. It runs on your Mac's own Neural Engine rather than on a server somewhere, and it does not read a video while it is playing, only a still frame you have paused on or exported.

How do you copy text from an image in Preview?

Preview is worth learning first, since it is also where PDFs and scanned documents already live.

1. Open the image in Preview, by double-clicking it in Finder or dragging it onto the Preview icon in the Dock.
2. Hover the pointer over the text. The cursor changes from an arrow to a text I-beam wherever Live Text has recognised something.
3. Drag across the words you want, the same motion as selecting text in a document, or press Command-A to grab everything Live Text has found on the page in one go.
4. Control-click the selection and choose Copy Text, or press Command-C. Paste it into any app the way you would paste anything else.

Apple's own guide to interacting with text in a photo using Live Text in Preview covers this menu and the Control-click options in full.

How do you grab text without even opening the file?

Select an image in Finder and press the space bar for Quick Look, and Live Text is already active in the preview window. A small icon appears in the bottom right corner of the image whenever text has been found. Click it and you get a Copy All button that grabs everything recognised in one go, which is the fastest route when you want the whole thing. You can also skip the button entirely and drag over just the words you need, exactly as in Preview.

Copying text from a photo in Photos, or a picture in Safari

In the Photos app, open a photo that contains text, hover the pointer over it, then Control-click your selection and choose Copy Text, or press Command-C. It behaves the same as Preview once you are hovering over the right spot.

Safari works on any picture sitting on a web page, not just ones you have saved. Hover over the text inside the image, drag to select it, then Control-click the selection and choose Copy. This is also how you pull a phone number, an address or an email out of a photo somebody has posted, without saving the image first.

What if the text is on paper, not on your Mac yet?

Continuity Camera gets a physical page onto your Mac without a scanner. In Finder, or inside an app like Notes, Mail or TextEdit, Control-click where you want the picture, then choose Import from iPhone or iPad, followed by Scan Documents or Take Photo. Your iPhone's camera opens, you capture the page, tap Use Photo, and it lands on your Mac as an image or a scanned PDF a moment later. From there, Live Text reads it exactly as it would any other picture.

When Live Text is not quite the right tool

Live Text is built for images you already have open in one of those four apps. It is not built for grabbing text out of whatever happens to be on screen right now, a paused video, a PDF that refuses to let you select anything, a slide someone is screen sharing, or a menu item with no selectable text at all. That is a genuinely different job, and dedicated tools exist for it. TextSniper, for one, sits in the menu bar and turns a keyboard shortcut into a screenshot style capture that reads text out of anything on screen the moment you release it, for $7.99 to $11.99 depending on how many Macs you need it on, paid once. If you are reaching for the same trick several times a day across sources Live Text cannot touch, that is worth the small price. If you already have the picture open in Preview or Photos, Live Text does the same job for nothing.

Muse takes a different, narrower slice of the same idea. It is a Mac app for keeping images, screenshots and links in one library, and it reads the text inside everything you save into it automatically, on your own machine, as it arrives. That is not extraction: it is so a screenshot with an invoice number, or an address, or a name in it turns up later when you search your library for that word, without you ever having opened the image to copy anything out.