How to Copy Text From an Image on Mac

If the picture is a file, or it’s open in Photos, Preview, Quick Look or Safari, your Mac’s built-in Live Text can already copy its text: drag over it and copy. For a picture anywhere else on your screen — in a chat, a PDF that won’t let you select, a design app — freeze the screen with Nab and drag over the text.

The built-in ways

Live Text in Photos and Preview (macOS 12 or later). Open the image, drag across the text as if it were a document, then Control-click and choose Copy Text. Phone numbers, email addresses and links in the picture become clickable too. Live Text is on unless it’s been switched off in System Settings › General › Language & Region.

If dragging in Preview draws a box instead of selecting text, choose Tools › Text Selection and try again.

Live Text in Safari and Quick Look. Safari lets you select text in pictures on web pages. In Finder, select an image and press Space to open it in Quick Look; you can usually select its text there too.

Shortcuts. The Shortcuts app has an “Extract Text from Image” action, handy if you do the same thing to lots of files.

Chrome. Right-click a picture on a web page and choose “Search with Google Lens”, then select the text in the Lens panel. The picture goes to Google’s servers to be read.

Visual Intelligence (macOS 27). With Apple Intelligence on, ⌘⇧6 lets you drag over part of the screen and ask about it. Early reviews say you can’t copy the text it returns.

Not every language is supported by Live Text, and not in every region.

Where they fall short

• The picture has to be in the right place. Live Text works in Photos, Preview, Quick Look and Safari. A picture posted in Slack or Discord, a locked PDF, a slide in a remote desktop window, a Figma canvas, text inside a game: none of those count.
• Everything else needs a screenshot first. Capture it, open it in Preview, select, copy, then delete the file. That’s a lot of steps for one sentence.
• Google Lens uploads the picture, which you may not want for anything private.

With Nab

1. With the image anywhere on screen — a web page, a chat, a PDF, a design app — press ⌘⇧2.
2. Drag over the text in the image. It’s copied the moment you let go; double-click to grab a single word.
3. Paste it anywhere, then press Esc to unfreeze.

Nab uses the same Live Text engine as Photos and Preview, so the recognition is just as good, and it all happens on your Mac. The difference is that it works on whatever is on your screen, with no screenshot to open or clean up afterwards.