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

By the CopyPal team · 24 September 2026 · 6 min read

An error message, a confirmation number, a paragraph someone sent as a picture. macOS can read text out of an image without extra software, and a clipboard manager can do it for every screenshot you take, automatically, so you can search them later.

Live Text: select text in any image

Since macOS 12 Monterey, images with readable text are selectable almost everywhere Apple shows them. Apple calls it Live Text, and it works on screenshots, photos and pictures on web pages.

1. Open the image in Preview or Photos, or select the file in Finder and press Space for Quick Look.
2. Move the pointer over the text. When it turns into a text cursor, drag to select, or double-click a word.
3. Press ⌘C, then paste wherever you like.

Right-clicking the selection offers Look Up, Translate and, for addresses, phone numbers and links, the matching action. The same works on images in Safari: hover, select, copy. If nothing happens, check that Live Text is on under System Settings › General › Language & Region, and that the text in the image is large and sharp enough to read.

The catch: you have to know which screenshot

Live Text is perfect when the picture is in front of you. It does nothing for the screenshot you took three days ago, whose file name is Screenshot 2026-09-21 at 14.02.11.png, somewhere on the desktop with forty others. Finder cannot search inside images, and Spotlight only finds screenshots by their file names.

Read every screenshot automatically, and search them

This is the part we built CopyPal for. It is a clipboard manager: it keeps everything you copy, and it also records every screenshot you take. The text inside each one is recognised on your Mac the moment it is captured, and stored alongside the image. From then on, a search for a word finds the screenshot that contains it, even if you never named the file.

Press ⇧⌘V, type a word from the screenshot, and pick it. Then:

• ↩ pastes the image itself.
• ⇧↩ pastes the recognised text instead, with no image involved.
• Copy text puts just the words on the clipboard, for a message or a form.
• Open page takes you back to the web page the screenshot was taken of, because CopyPal also records the app and page behind every screenshot.

Recognition happens on the Mac with Apple's built-in text recognition. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and the images and their text live in a local database in your user folder.

Getting cleaner text out of a screenshot

• Take the screenshot at the size the text is displayed; zooming the page to 125 percent first helps with small type.
• Capture a region (⇧⌘4) around the text rather than the whole screen, so the recogniser is not reading a hundred unrelated words.
• Dark text on a light background reads better than light on dark. If a dark-mode app gives poor results, switch it to light for the capture.
• Expect the odd mistake with codes that mix letters and digits, such as O and 0 or l and 1. Check those before you paste them into a form.

Questions