Text Lens Can Copy Any Text From Your Mac Screen
There are many ways to copy text that isn’t easily highlighted, but few are as easy and fast as Text Lens ($6), a new Mac app from prolific developer Sindre Sorhus . Text Lens allows you to select any part of your Mac screen and automatically copy all the text from that part. This makes it easy to copy text from images, videos, scanned pages, settings menus, and other types of text that would otherwise be impossible to obtain.
Text Lens vs Apple Live Text
Live Text, built into macOS , allows you to capture text from screenshots. While it’s good enough to start with, it only works with Safari, Preview, and the built-in screenshot tool. You can’t select text from other apps without first taking a screenshot, which adds an extra step to the process. With tools like Text Lens, you can instantly go into highlight mode to capture and copy text. There is no need to take a screenshot and then extract the text.
Using Text Lens on your Mac
Text Lens is a simple and fast app, but you’ll need to spend time setting it up to get the most out of the app. After installing the app, click its icon in the menu bar and go to Settings . On the General tab, enable the following options:
-
Launch on login
-
Click the icon in the menu bar to take a photo [you can right click it to open the menu]
Then go to the Shortcuts tab and write down the keyboard shortcuts for that app. You can even use Hyper Key Raycast to quickly create unique shortcuts. Once this is done, you are ready to use the application. Try using a keyboard shortcut or clicking the icon in the menu bar to launch the selector. Click and drag to close the area you want to copy text from, and release the mouse when you’re done.
Text Lens will display a pop-up confirming whether the text has been copied to the clipboard. (In case the copy fails, the same pop-up window will tell you that the text was not detected.) Once the copy is successful, you can paste the text into any application and continue with your day. This app supports 18 languages including English, French and Spanish.
Text Lens will also let you copy text from saved files on your Mac: You can import images, PDFs, or other files, and Text Lens will copy whatever’s on the page. The app can also copy text from images to the clipboard.
While I was very impressed with Text Lens’ accuracy when processing small pieces of text, I imported a few larger pieces of text to see how it worked. To do this, I compared it to the results of TextSniper ($11.99 for an unlimited license) and Cleanshot X ($29), two other Mac apps that let you copy text from images. I used one of my accounts to see how all three apps handled formatting issues, and at the end of a quick test, TextSniper handled the file the best.
Text Lens and Cleanshot X were able to capture text from the invoice reasonably well, but they both had a few typos and messed up the formatting. Both apps list all products and dates first and add up prices at the end. Meanwhile, TextSniper has listed each item, its date and price together. It also had the fewest typos.
However, for basic text copying, Text Lens does a good job and is reasonably priced. I hope it gets better at copying large amounts of text in the future, but for copying a few lines here and there it will do what you need without too much hassle.