How To Capture Any Text From Your Screen On Mac, iPhone or iPad

Sometimes it can be difficult or impossible to select text to copy from a web page or image. But you can use Live Text or take a screenshot and copy text from that instead.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can copy text even when you can't select text on your Mac. 
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Now usually when you want to copy text from something on your Mac you simply select the text, Copy, and then you've got it and you can Paste it somewhere else. But every once in a while you can't select text. For instance you may be looking at an image, not a text document, and you can't select the text on the image. So let me show you several ways that you can get around this. 
As an example here let's say I've got an image on the web. So it's an image, not text. Text you can usually easily select and copy. But not so in the case of an image. So the first thing I want to show you is that sometimes you can select text even though it is an image. This is thanks to a feature in macOS called Live Text. Live Text will look at images. It will look at them in Quick Look. It will look at them in various apps. It will look at them in a Safari web browser. It will try to determine if there is text there and let you select the text if there is so. Sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can't. In this case with this image it doesn't look like you can because you can see the pointer changes to a magnifying glass. If I click it enlarges the text and quickly again goes back. So it looks like I can't select. In addition to that if I try to select the text anywhere by clicking and dragging it will try to drag the image. So it looks like I can't select the text. 
However, sometimes persistence pays off. If I try a few times I find that I can click on some text and select it. Now note when you're doing this what is actually happening is your Mac is interpreting the text in the image and figuring out what it says. It's not a feature of the image. It is not a feature of the website. It is a feature of your Mac itself. So this is a handy function here. Now when I select all the text like this I can simply do Command C to copy. I can makeup a TextEdit window or Pages or something else and Command V to paste and you can see you can paste the text. It's actually looking at the characters in the image. So that means it could get something wrong especially if the text is handwritten or in an unusual font or very low resolution. So you definitely want to check the text over before you use it in something important. 
Let's say this didn't work. You just couldn't seem to be able to select the text in any way. This could happen. The webpage could result in such as way that you just can't select the text or maybe it's not even an image. Maybe the text is actually on the webpage but the webpage itself is specifically prohibiting you from selecting it. So how can you do it then? Well, you can take a screenshot of it. The screenshot itself is an image but now you've got that image on your Mac it is no longer part of the webpage and you can copy text from it. 
So I'm going to use the default screenshot shortcut, Shift Command and 5. That's the default keyboard shortcut for Screen Capture. That brings up the controls here. I've got the ability to capture the entire screen if I want. I can capture a selected window or a selected portion. I think this is the most useful in this case because I can capture just the area I want. Under Options I'm not going to worry where to save it to because I'm not actually going to save anything. You'll see in a moment how I do that. Then with the Timer set to None, Show Floating Thumbnail. It is important that this is On. Remember Last Selection, if I want to keep recapturing the same portion of the screen then I may want to turn this on. Show Mouse Pointer is Off. I don't need the pointer getting in the way.
Now that I've got that what I need to do is I need to select the portion of the screen. You'll only see these crosshairs if you've got this button here if you have this turned On. So now I'm going to drag and Select. When I'm done I can click Capture. Now once I do that I'm going to see the Floating Thumbnail at the bottom right. I need to click that BEFORE it goes away. After a few seconds it goes away and it saves to that default location. But I don't want to save this. Instead I want it to just appear here and now I can do things with it like mark it up, which isn't what I want to do here. Instead I want to select Text. Notice I can move over the text here. If I double-click a word it selects it and I can drag and select the text. Now when I selected it I can do Command C for copy. Now I've got a copy. I don't want to save the screenshot. So I'm just going to, instead of clicking Done, I'm going to click the little Trashcan or Bin icon here and it gets rid of it. It's gone. Now I can go into another app, Command V to paste, and it pastes the text in. 
Alternatively I can do Shift Command 5 and then select the area and I can also, after capturing and clicking on the thumbnail, then I can click this button here. What this button here does is it shows you where text is found. So if I click there you can see how it selected all that text. I get a Copy All button. I can still go and select just a portion of the text if I want or I can use the handy Copy All button and then Trash and now I've got it in the Clipboard ready to paste. 
Another technique you may want to do is to zoom in on the text you want. Notice how small this text is. It is kind of a miracle that it can even read this text and get the correct characters. But if I'm in a web browser I can always pinch out with two fingers on the trackpad or use other techniques, like View, Zoom In. I'm going to do that a little bit here so you can see now I've got the text much larger on the screen. Now when I do a screenshot I can grab this and you can see how it is going to do a better job and having nicer text in here. This will ensure that I'll get the best quality read of this text here when I copy it and maybe fewer mistakes. 
I can do the same thing with the iPhone or iPad. When you're viewing an image in an app, like say in Safari, often you can tap and select the text. The trick is to tap and hold down and then you can select the text. If you can that's great. If you can't get it that way you can still use the screenshot method. To take a screenshot on the iPhone or iPad you want to use the volume Up button and the side or top or Home button depending upon which model you've got. It takes a screenshot. Now you've got the little floating thumbnail like before. Tap that to bring it up. So now in the screenshot utility here you can do a lot of different things. One of those is you can use the same Live Text functionality to select Text there. But if you find that difficult to use you've got the button at the lower right. You can tap that and then you'll get options here. You may not see the Copy Text button there because it may find links and other things and put buttons for that instead. I find it helps to use the Cropping Tools there to crop to what you want, like that. Then use this button and then when there are no URLs or anything in there you may find it is more likely that the Copy All button shows up. Now you've got that. Anyway you do it you can use the Trash or Bin button up here to delete the screenshot so that that's gone. Then you can Paste the text that you copied into another app. It works the same in the iPad but that Text button in the screenshot utility seems to be at the top not at the bottom. 
So using either Live Text directly on the image or by taking a screenshot and using Live Text with the screenshot, you can copy almost any text that you can see on the screen of your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 8 Responses to “How To Capture Any Text From Your Screen On Mac, iPhone or iPad”

John C

9 months ago

Using Command-Shift-5 to copy a portion of the screen leaves that portion of the screen bright and the rest of the screen dim. This is a bug in the OS that has been there for ages. I have to log out and log back in to recover.

Gary Rosenzweig

John: Are you sure you aren't starting a recording instead of a screenshot? I remember seeing that bug years ago, but not for a long time.

Jim Terrinoni

Yes, useful! The Screen Shot could man’s is one of the MOST useful I have learned from Gary. I use it daily. I’ve wondered what the button at the bottom right was; now I know. Thank you Gary. Every day I get more efficient because of the work you but in and clearly communicate.

Keith Richardson

I prefer to use Command-Shift-4.
This immediately allows me to select the area of the screen that I am most interested in.

Alex Rodriguez

Gary, you're a genius! It worked just as you said. I watched a YouTube video with some text on the screens that I wanted to copy, and—bingo! It worked perfectly. Thank you!

CV Young

You mention "screenshot shortcut, Shift Command and 5." Like Keith Richardson, I use ShiftCommand4 for a partial screen picture and ShiftCommand3 for a screen dump. Please explain the differences.

CV: Shift+Command+5 gives you all of the options, whereas the other two do just the precise function you want in that case. Try it and you'll see.

Sheldon

Thanks bunches