How to copy text from a screenshot or image on Mac

Open the screenshot or image in Preview or Photos (or select it in Finder and press Space for Quick Look), hold the pointer over the text until it turns into a text cursor, drag to select, and press ⌘C. That’s Live Text, built into macOS, and it works on any image file you can open. If the text is on your screen rather than in a file (a video, an error dialog, an app that won’t let you select), hypershot’s OCR capture, ⌘⇧O, lets you drag a box over it and puts the recognized text straight on your clipboard, with no screenshot to save and reopen.

The built-in way: Live Text

Live Text has been part of macOS since Monterey, and it’s genuinely good. In Preview:

1. Open the image.
2. Hold the pointer over the text. If it becomes a text cursor, Live Text has found the text.
3. Drag to select what you want, Control-click the selection and choose Copy Text (or press ⌘C).
4. If you can’t select anything, choose Tools → Text Selection. If you’d picked a markup or selection tool, you’ll be selecting pixels instead of text.

Photos works the same way: drag across the text, then ⌘C. Live Text also picks out phone numbers, email addresses and links, so you can click a URL in a photo and open it. Control-click a selection for Look Up and Translate, too.

For text that’s on screen but not in a file, the built-in route is two steps: take a screenshot with ⌘⇧4, then open that file in Preview and select the text.

If nothing is selectable anywhere, check that Live Text is on in System Settings → General → Language & Region. It isn’t available in every language or region; Apple lists support on its macOS feature availability page.

On macOS 27 with Siri AI turned on (in beta, on Apple silicon Macs), ⌘⇧6 lets you select part of the screen and ask Siri about it. That’s an assistant rather than a copy-text tool, but it can be handy for “what does this say”.

The trade-offs of Live Text:

• It needs an image to open. Text on a live screen means screenshot, find file, open, select, copy.
• Selecting is by hand. Long passages or columns of numbers take careful dragging.
• The screenshot sticks around. Each one is another file on your Desktop to clean up later.

With hypershot: OCR capture

hypershot reads the text right off the screen:

1. Press ⌘⇧O (or choose OCR Capture from the menu bar menu).
2. Drag a box around the text.
3. Let go. The recognized text is on your clipboard.

That’s the whole thing. A few details make it better than it sounds:

• It works on anything you can see: a paused video, a slide in a screen share, a locked PDF, a design mock, an app that disables text selection.
• Freeze if it’s moving. Press Space while selecting to freeze the screen, then take your time with the box.
• Line breaks your way. Settings → OCR → Remove line breaks joins wrapped lines into one paragraph, useful for text pasted into a form or a chat.
• See what it read. By default the text also opens in your text editor so you can check it; turn that off in Settings → OCR if you only want the clipboard.
• On your Mac. hypershot uses Apple’s own Vision framework for recognition, on the pixels you selected. Nothing is uploaded.

Text in a capture you already took

If the text is in a hypershot capture you took earlier, open it in the editor, set the artboard crop around the text, and click OCR in the toolbar. The text goes to your clipboard. The OCR capture docs cover both routes and the settings.

Tips for clean results

• Select tight. Less background means fewer guesses.
• Contrast helps. Dark text on a light background reads best; tiny or low-contrast text reads worse in any OCR.
• Proofread numbers. A 0 and an O, or a 1 and an l, can still swap in some fonts. Check anything you’ll paste into a terminal or a bank form.

There’s a longer write-up of how hypershot’s OCR works in convert images to text.

Can I copy text from a screenshot without saving it first?

With Live Text, no: it works on an image you’ve opened. With hypershot’s OCR capture, yes: you select text on screen and only the text is kept.

How do I do this on Windows?

Snipping Tool’s Text actions does it on Windows 11. See how to copy text from a screenshot or image on Windows.