Extracting Text From Images With Live Text on a Mac

You can use Live Text to get text from a photo on your Mac in a variety of different apps and situations. You can simply copy the text and paste it elsewhere, or you can take quick actions from text like addresses, dates and phone numbers.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using a Live Text feature in macOS. 
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So Live Text is the name Apple gives to a feature where you can get text from an image. The idea is it's a real image. It's not a PDF or anything like that where the text is actually there. It's just pixels in the image like an image you took with your camera. 
For instance in Preview here I've opened up the image called Treasure.jpg and I can zoom in here and I could see that these are pixels here. So this isn't text. This is just a photograph of a page of text. With Live Text I can get the text from this. That works in a variety of situations. For instance here I am in the Preview App and if I move my pointer over the text notice how it changes to a Text Cursor. I can actually click and drag and select text. I can select all of it. I can select just a few words. Whatever I want. When it is selected like that I can use Edit, Copy or Command C to copy the text. Then I can go into another app, say TextEdit here, and use Edit, Paste or Command V to paste the text in. So that is the basic idea. You can see it working here in Preview. It is not a feature of Preview. It's a feature of the Operating System. In fact one pitfall to be careful of is if you go in to edit the image here in Preview and then you switch to one of the imaging editing tools, like the Selection Tool, now you'll just be selecting pixels in the image and you can't get back to Text Selection. You would have to turn off the tools there and now you can go back in and select text. So Preview is one way you can look at an image file and then copy text and paste it somewhere else. 
But you can also do it in Quick Look. So just by selecting the file here and pressing the spacebar I'm now in Quick Look and you see I can select text just like I can in Preview.  So I didn't actually have to open the file in Preview or open it in anything. I can just use Quick Look and then use Live Text to grab some text I want from the image. But in Quick Look you also have some other things you can do. Notice this little button here at the bottom right hand corner. This means that Live Text is active. That macOS has recognized that in this image there is text and it can be selected. I can also click on this button and it will show me the text it's found. I can continue to go  and select the text. But I also get this Copy All button here. Now I can easily copy all the text. Then here in TextEdit I can paste it. 
Now another app where this works is Photos. So say this was a photo that you took with your iPhone so it went into your Photos Library. Now you've got it there. Notice that I can select text here in the Photos App when viewing a photo and I get that same button at the bottom right hand corner and can use the Copy All button there. 
The use for this is to actually scan text like a page of text in the example, but you can also use it for things like getting information from receipts. For instance, here's a photo of a receipt and you can go in here and, say, copy just one thing like maybe a number, just copy that, and paste it into another document. Or you can copy like a whole table worth of information there. If I copy that and then paste it in you can see I get all the data. It's just going to put it in order here. It's not going to do anything fancy with columns. But it beats typing in the information. 
Now when you have a document that actually has actionable information on it you can actually do more. So, for instance, here I can certainly select all this text just like before. But there are things in here, like for instance here's a time. If I move my pointer over it you can see it changes to this Data Selector here. I can click on it and I can create an event. Here I've got an address and I can click on it and show the address in Maps or look it up. I've got a website URL here and I can open the link. I've got a phone number here and I can call it or add it to Contacts. In fact if I click the button at the bottom right you see it gives me all these options here. It recognizes that there is an URL, there's a phone number, there's a location, and that there is a date and time. I can click on one of those and I can add a new event or I can click on this one and it will show me a map location, or click on this one and it will take me to the website. So that's really handy so you don't have to go and copy the URL here and then paste it to a web browser or type it in. You can actually use a series of clicks and get to it without having to type anything. 
Here's another example using a picture of a menu. I can zoom in here on the menu. This is in the Photos App. I can select text here in the menu and copy it and paste it in as text somewhere else. Or I can Control Click on it and you could see I get the ability to look up the text. I can translate it. I can start a Search with it as well. So it is really useful for getting text out of photos. It's also useful for taking  actions without having to type, like taking a date, or a location, or phone numbers, something like that. 
But it is important to know what it is not really good for. It's not good for scanning large amounts of text. If you want to scan in a whole document or a book, you probably want to use some scanning software that has good optical character recognition functions so they can easily scan in many different pages at a time. It's not good for processing data. If you have a whole pile of receipts and you want to scan them all in and put all of the amounts into a database it's going to be painstaking to do that using Live Text. There are apps that you can get that specifically handle that kind of thing. But it does certainly does come in handy in a variety of different situations and it's also available on the iPhone and iPad. It's particularly useful on the iPhone because you can not only do it on a photo but you can do it while you're using the Camera App. So you can just point your camera at something and then grab a piece of text from that and take an action with it like say call a phone number that is on a sign. 
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Extracting Text From Images With Live Text on a Mac”

Chris in CT

1 year ago

I love Live Text, but find its limitations puzzling.
Live Text works well with png and jpg images in Apple apps like Preview, Photos, and Quick Look. However, Live Text does not seem to work with pdf images. Please explain what is going on.
As a test, I saved a screen shot (png) of the Squire Trelawney example in this video, opened it in Preview, and LiveText worked fine. After exporting the png from Preview as a pdf, Live Text could not read it. Exporting the pdf again as a jpg made it readable

Gary Rosenzweig

Chris: I think it has to do with the complexity of PDFs. They can be just images on a page, but they can also be many layers of images, vector graphics and actual text.

Rick Isaacs

I have found the following video on macmost.com about a shortcut that is also useful for copying text from the screen:

macOS Shortcuts: Capture Text From Your Screen 11/10/21

Lindy

9 months ago

I kept thinking why don't they just call it OCR instead of Live Text... but you explained the difference at the end of the video...
This feature is one of the few bells and whistles I like in Sonoma... much of it is bloatware, that I will never use. Too bad we don't have to option to remove stuff we don't want. Some of the voices are horrific but we are stuck with them.

Comments Closed.

Extracting Text From Images With Live Text on a Mac

Comments: 4 Responses to “Extracting Text From Images With Live Text on a Mac”

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