How to Finally Copy Text From Photos on Mac
With macOS Monterey, you can finally scan and copy text from photos to your Mac. The next time you want to save time at school or quickly copy phone numbers from a business card, highlighting and copying text from images will help you a lot. Here’s how to do it.
How to copy text from photos on macOS Monterey
MacOS Monterey allows not only super-fast text translation , but also highlight text within images. This feature is called Live Text, and it’s also available on iPhones and iPads running iOS 15 . The next time you see text inside an image on your Mac, drag your mouse pointer over to it and the cursor changes from an arrow to a selection tool. Then you can click and drag your cursor over the text to select it.
After the text is selected, you can right-click (or use the keyboard shortcut Control + Click ) to open the context menu. Here you can decide if you want to copy the text, translate it, or quickly use the Find tool to find more information about the selected text. If you spot the name of a famous place like Niagara Falls in the picture, Look Up will show you its entry on Wikipedia. Likewise, finding an address opens a floating window with the location in Apple Maps.
Live Text works for the most part without issue, but at the moment it only works in Safari, Photos, the built-in screenshot tool, and Quick Look (a preview tool that lets you preview images and documents by pressing the spacebar). …
Sometimes the cursor may not immediately change to a selection tool, but a single click on the image solves this problem. Another limitation: Live Text currently only supports Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish; this function does not work if the text inside images is in other languages.
How to copy text inside images on older versions of macOS
If you haven’t upgraded to macOS Monterey yet, you can try TextSniper to extract text from images. The application has a seven-day free trial version (via Setapp ), and after that it will cost 6.99 dollars.
TextSniper has several advantages over Apple’s Live Text feature. First, it allows you to drag a large area and automatically grab all the text within it, so you spend less time trying to select text within images. The app simplifies this process by mapping itself to a convenient keyboard shortcut ( Command + Shift + 2 ). Secondly, it is not limited to a few applications on your Mac.
Unfortunately TextSniper does not officially support Monterey yet. If you have macOS Big Sur, it supports English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Spanish. MacOS Catalina only supports English.