How to copy text from a screenshot on a Mac

You have a screenshot of a tracking number, an error message or a paragraph from a PDF, and you want the words, not the picture. Retyping them is slow and you will get a character wrong. macOS can read the text for you, and it has been able to since 2021. This guide covers the built-in ways first, what to do when they don’t work, and where a different tool starts to make sense.

How do you copy text from a screenshot on a Mac?

Open the screenshot and select the text in it, the way you would in a document. This works because of Live Text, which Apple introduced with macOS 12 Monterey. Apple describes it as using “on-device machine learning to detect text in photos”, so you can copy and paste it, call a number or open a link.

In Preview

1. Open the screenshot in Preview. Double-click the file, or Control-click it and choose Open With › Preview.
2. Hold the pointer over the text. It turns into a text cursor when Live Text has found something.
3. Drag to select the words you want.
4. Control-click the selection and choose Copy Text, or press ⌘C.
5. Paste it wherever you need it with ⌘V.

Those are the steps in Apple’s Preview guide, which also says what to do when nothing happens: choose Tools › Text Selection to turn on the Text Selection tool.

In Quick Look

You don’t have to open Preview at all. Select the screenshot in the Finder and press Space to preview it. Macworld describes selecting text in Quick Look too, so try dragging across the words and pressing ⌘C. If the pointer doesn’t change, open the screenshot in Preview instead.

Straight from a new screenshot

When you take a screenshot with ⇧⌘5 or ⇧⌘4, macOS shows a thumbnail in the corner for a few seconds. Click it to open the screenshot in Markup, which is the quickest way to get to the same picture without hunting for the file. If you’ve set the screenshot to save to the clipboard only, paste it into Preview with File › New from Clipboard first.

What if Live Text doesn’t select anything?

Most failures come down to a short list.

The text is in a language Live Text doesn’t read. Apple’s feature availability page lists the languages and regions. For this guide I checked it for macOS Tahoe and it names Cantonese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), English in many regions, French in Belgium, Canada, Luxembourg and Switzerland, German, Italian and Portuguese (Brazil). Apple’s Preview guide says plainly that Live Text isn’t available in all regions or languages. Apple’s Ventura announcement also mentions Japanese and Korean. If your screenshot is in a language on neither list, the built-in tools probably won’t help, and I can’t tell you how well any of them cope with it.

The image is hard to read. Very small type, low contrast, a heavily styled font or a compressed screenshot taken at low resolution can all defeat text recognition. I don’t have an accuracy figure to give you and Apple doesn’t publish one. If a screenshot fails, take it again with the window larger, or zoom in before you capture.

Text Selection is off in Preview. Choose Tools › Text Selection, as Apple says.

Live Text is switched off. Apple’s guide to Language & Region settings lists a Live Text option, “Select text in images to copy or take action.” Open System Settings, click General, then Language & Region, and check that it’s turned on.

You’re looking at the wrong file. A screenshot saved as a PDF or in an app’s own format may not behave like a plain image. Open the original image file, a PNG or, if you capture in HDR on macOS Tahoe, a HEIF.

If none of that helps, you can still get the text out another way, which is the next section.

Can you OCR a screenshot without opening it?

Yes, with the Shortcuts app. Shortcuts arrived on the Mac in macOS 12 Monterey, and it has an action called Extract Text from Image that reads the text in a picture. You can chain it to others, so one shortcut can take a screenshot of a region, read it and put the words on the clipboard.

A basic version looks like this:

1. Open Shortcuts and choose File › New Shortcut.
2. Add the Take Screenshot action and set it to take an interactive screenshot of a region instead of a window.
3. Add Extract Text from Image after it.
4. Add Copy to Clipboard.
5. Name the shortcut, then run it from the Shortcuts window, the menu bar, or a keyboard shortcut you assign in the shortcut’s details.

Run it, drag a box around the words, and the text is on your clipboard. You can also give it files: add Receive Input set to images, and run it from the Finder’s Quick Actions menu if you add it there.

This is also the answer if you want to read text from many files in a script. It won’t keep the text anywhere you can search later, though. It leaves you with text on the clipboard, and you’d add actions of your own to save it somewhere.

How do you copy text from many screenshots at once?

This is where the built-in options run out. Preview opens several images in one window, but you still select and copy one image at a time. Quick Look does the same. A shortcut can loop over a set of files and gather their text, and that’s a fair answer if you enjoy building them, but you’ll write and maintain it yourself.

The other problem is finding the right screenshot to copy from. The built-in tools assume you already have the file open. If you remember only that it was “the shipping confirmation from last week”, you still have to find it first. The guide to searching the text in screenshots on a Mac covers what Spotlight can do there.

I built DejaShot for that gap. It reads the text in every screenshot in the folders you choose, so the text is already there when you need it, and you search for the screenshot instead of opening files one by one. Two parts of it matter here:

• Copy Text. Select a result in the panel and press ⇧⌘C to copy all the text DejaShot read from that screenshot. You don’t open the file first.
• Show Text Regions. Open the screenshot in DejaShot and this outlines every line it read. Click a line to copy just that line, which is handy when a screenshot has a code or an address in the middle of a lot of other text.

So the flow is search, select, copy. A search takes 31 ms across 20,000 screenshots. At the 95th percentile, on an M2 Pro, measured in the search engine itself. DejaShot uses the text recognition built into macOS, and you choose its languages in Settings. It doesn’t read every language, and it won’t rescue a blurry capture.

It requires macOS 14 or later and you pay once. The pricing page has the details. If you need to copy text from a screenshot once in a while, Preview is enough and you don’t need anything else.

DejaShot isn’t the only tool that can put a screenshot’s text on the clipboard, and some capture apps offer a text-capture mode of their own. If you’re weighing it against a floating-screenshot app, see DejaShot compared with ScreenFloat.

Is OCR on a Mac private?

The built-in route is. Apple’s newsroom says Live Text “uses on-device machine learning”, so the recognition runs on your Mac rather than on a server. Nothing about the Preview steps above needs an internet connection.

DejaShot works the same way. Reading, searching and everything else happen on your Mac. It never sends your screenshots, their text or where they came from anywhere. It goes online only to activate your license, to check in about every two weeks, and to check for updates.

A caution applies to any OCR app that isn’t built into macOS. Many web tools and some apps upload your image to a server to read it. If a screenshot has a password, an invoice or a private message in it, check where the recognition runs before you use one.

Which way should you pick?

If you want to go further, the guide to finding an old screenshot on a Mac picks up the part where you only remember roughly when you took it.