# How to copy text from a screenshot or image on Mac

> Open the image in Preview or Photos, drag across the text, and press ⌘C (that's Live Text). For text on screen, hypershot's OCR capture copies it in one drag.

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.

*Read a QR code straight off your screen, or drag over text in a screenshot and get text you can edit.*

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](/docs/hypershot/capturing/ocr-capture/) 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](/blog/the-ocr-trick/).

## 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](/blog/copy-text-from-image-windows/).

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From https://hypernuclear.com/blog/copy-text-from-image-mac/