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Copy Text From a Photo, No Typing

Published 3 days ago • 1 min read

Hello Reader,

A client emails you a screenshot of a contract clause instead of the actual text.

Now you're retyping four paragraphs by hand.

Why This Matters

Retyping text from a screenshot wastes minutes that could be better spent.

Paying for a PDF app or an OCR service just to grab a few lines is money spent on a problem your Mac already solves natively.

Preview, the app already on every Mac, can read the text inside an image and hand it back to you as text you can paste.

Preview's Live Text

  1. Open the image in Preview and just click. macOS detects text in photos, screenshots, and scanned documents automatically. Move your cursor over a word and Preview shows a text cursor, meaning you can select it like text in any document. If it doesn't trigger automatically, turn on the Text Selection tool.
  2. Select, copy, and paste anywhere. Highlight a sentence, a paragraph, or the whole block, then copy it straight into an email, a proposal, or a note. No retyping.
  3. It does more than copy. Live Text can look up a word's definition, translate the selected text into another language, or search the web for it. If a phone number or email address appears in the image, you can click it to call, message, or add it to Contacts.

Pro Tip

Live Text isn't limited to still images.

Pause a video in QuickTime and the same trick works on that frame. Live Text in video was introduced with macOS 13 Ventura.

If it doesn't work on your Mac, check System Settings > General > Language & Region, and make sure "Live Text" is turned on. Unfortunately, it's available only in a limited number of regions.​

My guest on episode 177, Clive Moore, founder of GPT Studio and Agency In a Box, is actually the one who pointed out Preview's OCR trick in the first place.

He runs his whole business off a MacBook Pro, and he walks through the rest of his Mac setup, from Terminal habits to running AI models locally, in the full conversation.

👉 Access the complete show notes and video version of episode #177​

Cheers,
Damien

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