Copy text from any part of your screen on Mac
macOS Live Text can copy text from an image you open in Preview or Photos. Screen2Shot copies text from any area of the screen without saving an image: press ⇧⌘9, select the area and press ⇧⌘C. The contents of a QR code are copied too. Copy Text is part of PRO; macOS 14 Sonoma or later.
How to copy text from the screen
- Press ⇧⌘9 and drag over the text: an error dialog, a video frame, a slide in a call, a scanned page.
- Press ⇧⌘C, or click Copy Text in the toolbar.
- Paste with ⌘V wherever you need it. A capsule at the bottom of the screen says how many characters were copied, or “No text found” if the area held no readable text.
The text is read on your Mac with Apple’s own text recognition, and nothing is uploaded. No image is saved, and the area does not go into Recent Screenshots. Lines come out in reading order, top to bottom and left to right, and the language is detected automatically. Anything you drew on the selection is left out: the text is read from the screen under your drawings.
Scan a QR code on screen
Screen2Shot reads QR codes shown on your screen: on a web page, in a PDF, in a slide or a video call. Select the code with ⇧⌘9 and press ⇧⌘C: its contents go to the clipboard as text, after any other text in the area, and the capsule says “Copied text and QR code”. Screen2Shot does not open the link; you paste it where you choose. It reads codes on the screen only, not from the Mac’s camera or from paper.
Built-in macOS options and their limits
Live Text works in images you open in Preview or Photos: select the text, Control-click it and choose Copy Text (in Photos, ⌘C also works). For text on the screen, that means taking a screenshot first with ⇧⌘4, opening it, then selecting and copying, and the screenshot file is saved to the desktop until you delete it. Live Text also does more with the text than Screen2Shot: it can look up a word, translate it, or call a phone number it finds. Apple notes that Live Text isn’t available in all regions or languages. Where text is already selectable, as on most web pages, ⌘C is all you need. The capture keys are in how to take a screenshot on a Mac.
| Live Text (Preview, Photos) | Screen2Shot PRO | |
|---|---|---|
| Copy text from an image you opened | ✅ | ✅ select it on screen |
| Copy text from any area of the screen, no file saved | ❌ | ✅ ⇧⌘C |
| Look up, translate or call a number in the text | ✅ | ❌ |
| Costs nothing | ✅ built into macOS | ❌ PRO |
Checked on 2026-09-29. Sources below.
What people use it for
- Copying an error message from a dialog to search for it or paste it into a bug report.
- Pulling text out of a video, a slide shared in a call, or a picture someone sent.
- Getting a link from a QR code on a web page or a slide without reaching for your phone.