How to Copy Text From a Screenshot on Mac

Text trapped in an image is everywhere: a slide in a Zoom call, an error dialog you cannot select, a scanned PDF, a frame of a tutorial video. macOS can read that text for you. Here are four ways to do it, from the built-in options to the fastest workflow.

1. Live Text in Preview and Photos

Since macOS Monterey, Apple's Live Text recognizes text in images on supported Macs.

1. Take a screenshot with ⌘ ⇧ 4.
2. Open it in Preview (or click the thumbnail that appears in the corner).
3. Move the pointer over the text until it turns into a text cursor, then drag to select.
4. Press ⌘ C.

Good for: the occasional one-off. Downside: you still have to save, open and select, and you end up with a screenshot file you did not need.

2. Live Text in paused videos

Live Text also works in paused videos in QuickTime Player and Safari. Pause on the frame, hover the text, and select it like you would in a document. This is handy for code snippets in tutorials.

3. A Shortcuts automation

The Shortcuts app has an Extract Text from Image action. You can build a shortcut that takes a screenshot, extracts the text and copies it to the clipboard, then assign it a keyboard shortcut. It works, but it takes a few minutes to set up and there is no way to choose a region interactively without extra steps.

4. One keystroke with ScreenVerb

If you copy text from the screen more than once a day, the fastest option is an app built for it. With ScreenVerb:

1. Press your capture hotkey (Option-Shift-S by default).
2. Drag over the text.
3. Press the number key for Extract Text.

The text is recognized on your Mac with Apple's Vision framework, so nothing is uploaded for this step. ScreenVerb then switches back to the app you were in and pastes the text where your cursor was. No file is saved unless you want one.

Going beyond plain text

Once the text is out, the next step is usually doing something with it. Because ScreenVerb runs AI actions on the same capture, you can go straight from the image to the result you actually wanted:

• Translate a support ticket written in another language.
• Pull code out of a screenshot of a terminal or tutorial with a custom action.
• Summarize a long chat thread into three bullets for your notes.
• Explain a compiler error or an unfamiliar chart.

You can also write your own actions on keys 1 to 9 and pull the on-device OCR text into your prompt as a template variable.

Which method should you use?

You want to	Use
Grab text from a photo you already have	Live Text in Photos or Preview
Copy code from a paused tutorial	Live Text in QuickTime or Safari
Automate a fixed workflow	Shortcuts
Copy text from anywhere, many times a day	ScreenVerb