Guide
How to extract text from an image on a Mac
Screenshots, photos of documents, book pages, slides, scans: Textify reads the text in any image and gives it back as text you can copy, edit and save.
Updated
Short answer: press Control-Shift-Command-4 and drag over the text to copy a screenshot, paste it into Textify (⌘V), click Recognize text (OCR) (⌘R), then click Copy text. To keep the text, choose Save as… › Text file (.txt) (⌘T).
Text from a screenshot
The fastest way to get text out of anything on your screen, such as a video frame, a locked PDF, an image in a web page or an app that doesn’t let you select text:
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Copy a screenshot to the clipboard
Press Control-Shift-Command-4 and drag over the text. With Control, macOS copies the screenshot instead of saving it as a file.
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Paste it into Textify
Open Textify and press ⌘V, or choose Edit › Paste.
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Recognize the text
Click Recognize text (OCR) or press ⌘R. The text appears in the Text preview.
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Copy or save the text
Click Copy text and paste it anywhere, or choose Save as… › Text file (.txt) (⌘T) to keep it in a file.
Text from a photo or an image file
Open the image with Select image(s) or PDF(s) (⌘O), drop it on the Textify window or its Dock icon, or Control-click it in the Finder and choose Open With › Textify. JPEG, PNG, HEIC (iPhone photos), TIFF and the other image formats macOS opens all work.
The photo is still on your iPhone? Two ways to get it on your Mac without AirDrop or cables:
- Universal Clipboard: copy the photo on your iPhone or iPad, then press ⌘V in Textify on your Mac.
- Continuity Camera: choose File › Import from iPhone/iPad › Take Photo, take the picture with your iPhone, and it appears in Textify.
Both need your devices signed in to the same Apple Account, with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Handoff turned on.
With or without line breaks
Textify gives you the text two ways, both as plain text:
- With formatting: one line of text per line of the image, as on the page. Use Copy text, or Save as… › Text file (.txt) (⌘T).
- Without formatting: the lines joined into one continuous text, easier to paste into an email, a form or a translator. Use Copy text without formatting, or Save as… › Text file (.txt) without formatting (⌘Y).
The Formatted and Raw text buttons above the Text preview switch the preview between the two.
Text in columns
On a newspaper page or a two-column article, the lines of the columns can get mixed. Draw OCR zones around each column, in reading order, before you recognize the text: Textify then reads the zones one after the other. How to use OCR zones.
Search and correct the text
Press ⌘F to search the recognized text. To fix a misread word, click Edit text (⌘E): the lines you change are highlighted, and you can Control-click a line and choose Revert to undo your change. The corrected text is what you copy and save.
Questions and answers
How is Textify different from Live Text?
Live Text, built into macOS since macOS 12 Monterey, lets you select and copy text in photos and images, for example in Preview or Photos. It works well for a few words. Textify is made for whole documents: it handles multi-page PDFs and many images at once, lets you set the reading order of columns with OCR zones, lets you correct the text, and saves it as a text file or a searchable PDF.
Can I get the text of several images at once?
Yes. Select or drop several images together: Textify recognizes all of them, and Copy text and the text file contain the text of every image, in one go.
Does Textify keep fonts, bold text or tables?
No. Textify extracts plain text: the line breaks follow the lines of the image, but fonts, colors and table borders aren’t kept. To keep the look of the page with its text, save a searchable PDF instead.
Which languages can Textify read in images?
Up to 30 languages, depending on your macOS version, including English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and most European languages. See the list of OCR languages.
Why does copied text end with a note?
The free version adds a short note saying the text was recognized by the free version of Textify. You can delete it after pasting, or remove it for good with Textify PRO.
Are my screenshots sent anywhere?
No. Textify recognizes text on your Mac, without an internet connection, and collects no data.
Get the text out of your images
Textify is a free download on the Mac App Store.
macOS 10.15 or later · Apple silicon and Intel