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.

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

    1 year ago

    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
    1 year ago

    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
    10 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.

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