You screenshot an error message, a recipe, a Wi-Fi password on a poster, or a paragraph from a video call, and then you want the actual words, not a picture of them. The problem is that a screenshot is an image. The text you can clearly read is made of pixels, so there is nothing to highlight and nothing to copy. The good news: every major device can now read those pixels back into real text, usually in a couple of taps or one keyboard shortcut.
The technology behind this is optical character recognition, or OCR. It looks at the shapes in an image, recognises them as letters and numbers, and hands you back editable text. The steps for each platform are below, plus what to do when the result comes out wrong.
iPhone and iPad: Live Text
Apple builds OCR straight into the photo viewer through a feature called Live Text. To pull words out of a screenshot:
- Open the screenshot in the Photos app.
- Touch and hold any word in the image. After a moment the text becomes selectable, with the usual blue handles.
- Drag the handles to cover what you want, then tap Copy. You can also tap the Live Text icon (the small lines-in-a-box symbol) in the bottom corner to select everything at once.
The copied text now sits on your clipboard, ready to paste anywhere with a tap and hold. Live Text also recognises phone numbers, addresses and links inside the image and lets you act on them directly. It works in most languages and needs no separate app or upload.
Android: Google Lens and Circle to Search
Android handles this through Google Lens, which is built into Google Photos and the Google app. Open your screenshot in Google Photos, tap the Lens icon along the bottom, and Lens will scan the image. Tap any detected text to select it, adjust the selection, then choose Copy text. From there you can paste it into any app.
On newer phones there is an even faster route. Circle to Searchlets you long-press the home button or navigation bar from almost any screen, including while you are looking at a screenshot, then circle or tap text to capture it without opening a separate app. Both methods run Google’s OCR, so the accuracy is the same. The menus move around between Android versions and phone makers, so if a label is not exactly where described, look for the Lens icon or a “Select text” option nearby.
Windows: Snipping Tool and PowerToys
Windows 11 added OCR directly to the Snipping Tool. Press Win+Shift+S to start a capture, drag over the area you want, and the snip opens in the editor. Click the text actions button (it looks like a small page with lines) and Snipping Tool highlights every word it found. You can then copy individual lines or hit Copy all text. It even offers to redact email addresses and phone numbers before you copy, which is handy.
If you extract text constantly, install Microsoft PowerToys (a free, official utility) 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. There is no screenshot to take and no editor to open, which makes it the quickest option on Windows once it is set up.
Mac: Live Text in Preview and Quick Look
macOS uses the same Live Text engine as the iPhone. Open the screenshot in Preview, or just select the file in Finder and press the spacebar for Quick Look. Hover over the words and your cursor turns into a text selection cursor. Drag across the text, then press Cmd+C to copy it. You can also right-click a selection for the copy option. As on iPhone, detected phone numbers and addresses become clickable.
When OCR gets it wrong
OCR is excellent on clean, printed text and shakier everywhere else. A few conditions reliably cause misreads, and a few habits fix most of them:
- Tiny or blurry text. Zoom in before you screenshot so the letters are large and crisp. Low resolution is the single biggest cause of mistakes.
- Low contrast. Light grey text on a white background, or text over a busy image, confuses the recogniser. Switching a website or app to light mode before capturing can help.
- Decorative or condensed fonts. Unusual typefaces produce more errors. Always proofread the result, since a mistaken character in a password or code is easy to miss.
- Handwriting. Printed handwriting sometimes works, cursive rarely does. Treat anything handwritten as a rough draft to correct.
This is the same approach that works for any image, not just screenshots. If you are pulling text out of photos and documents too, our guides on how to copy text from a picture and how to copy text from a PDF cover the cases that differ. For the full picture across every kind of file, start with how to copy text from an image, screenshot or PDF.
Keep what you extract
Extracting text from a screenshot solves the immediate problem, but the words usually pass through your clipboard once and vanish the next time you copy something. If the thing you screenshotted matters, like a confirmation number, a quote, or a set of instructions, it is worth keeping it somewhere you can search later rather than hunting through your camera roll for the original image. A clipboard that remembers, and that can read the text inside your screenshots automatically, turns a one-off extraction into something you never have to do twice.