How to copy text from a picture

You have a photo of something with words on it. A handwritten note, a business card, a sign, a slide from a meeting, a page of a book. You want those words as actual text you can paste into a message or a document, without retyping them by hand. Good news: every modern phone and computer can do this, and most of them have had the feature for a while. The trick is that it hides behind a long press or a small icon, so plenty of people never find it.

The underlying technology is called OCR, short for optical character recognition. It looks at the shapes in an image and works out which letters they are, turning a flat picture into selectable text. Below is the exact tap-by-tap for each device. Pick yours and you will be copying in under a minute.

iPhone and iPad

Apple calls its version Live Text, and it works on photos already saved in your library, not only on what the camera sees right now.

• Open the photo in the Photos app.
• Press and hold any word in the image until it highlights, the same way you would select text on a web page.
• Drag the little handles to cover the words you want, then tap Copy.
• Paste anywhere with a tap and hold, then Paste, or Cmd+V on an external keyboard.

If holding your finger on the words does nothing, look for a small text icon in the bottom-right corner of the photo and tap it first. Live Text needs iOS 15 or later and is on by default in Settings under General, then Language & Region.

Android

Android handles this through Google Lens, which is built into Google Photos and the Google app on most phones.

• Open the picture in Google Photos.
• Tap the Lens icon at the bottom (a square made of dots and corners).
• Tap and hold the text, or tap Select text, then drag to cover what you want.
• Tap Copy, then paste with a long press and Paste wherever you need it.

Newer Pixel and Samsung phones also have Circle to Search: hold the home button or navigation bar, then circle the text in any image on screen to lift it out. Either route drops the words onto your clipboard. If you want them again later, that is where clipboard history comes in handy, since the clipboard only remembers your most recent copy.

Windows

Windows has two solid options, and you almost certainly have the first already.

Snipping Tool

• Open the image, or press Win+Shift+S to snip part of the screen.
• In the Snipping Tool window, click the Text Actions button (it looks like a small page of text).
• The readable words are highlighted. Select them, right-click, and choose Copy text.

PowerToys Text Extractor

If you grab text from images often, install Microsoft PowerToys (it is free) and turn on Text Extractor. Press Win+Shift+T, drag a box over any text anywhere on screen, and it lands on your clipboard instantly. It even reads text inside videos and apps that normally will not let you select anything.

Mac

macOS uses the same Live Text engine as the iPhone, so the steps will feel familiar.

• Open the picture in Preview or Quick Look (select the file and press Space).
• Click and drag across the words just like selecting normal text.
• Press Cmd+C, or right-click and choose Copy.
• Paste anywhere with Cmd+V.

Live Text on Mac needs macOS Monterey or later, and it runs on Intel Macs as well as Apple Silicon in the languages Apple supports. (On iPhone the gate is hardware: it needs an A12 Bionic chip or newer, which means an iPhone XS or later.) If a selection will not start, make sure you are viewing the actual image rather than a thumbnail.

A few tips for cleaner results

• Get close and straight. Fill the frame with the text and hold the camera square to the page. Crop tight before you run OCR so it is not guessing around the edges.
• Mind the lighting. Even, bright light with no shadow across the words beats a dark, contrasty photo every time.
• Check numbers and symbols carefully. Phone numbers, codes, and emails are where small misreads do the most damage, so reread those character by character.
• For documents, screenshots, and PDFs, use a real workflow. A photo of a page is harder to read than the page itself. If your source is a file rather than a snapshot, see how to copy text from an image, screenshot or PDF for the cleaner route.

Pictures versus screenshots and PDFs

The steps above are aimed at photographs, where the words are part of a real-world scene. The job changes a little depending on what you started with. A screenshot is already a clean digital image, so text recognition tends to be near-perfect; our guide to extracting text from a screenshot covers the fastest paths. A PDF is different again, because the text may already be selectable, or it may be a scanned page that needs OCR; that case is covered in how to copy text from a PDF.

Whatever the source, the principle is the same. Your devices can read the words for you, and the only real skill is knowing where the button hides. Once the text is on your clipboard, the next problem is keeping it, because your next copy replaces it. That gap is exactly what a permanent, searchable history is built to close.

Frequently asked questions