How to Copy Text from a Screenshot or Image on Mac

An error message in a screenshot, a code snippet in a video call, a paragraph in an image: retyping it is slow and error-prone. Your Mac can read the text for you.

With Live Text (built in)

On recent versions of macOS, Live Text recognizes text in images:

1. Open the screenshot in Preview (or select it in Finder and press Space for Quick Look).
2. Move the pointer over the text; it turns into a text cursor.
3. Drag to select, then press ⌘C.

This is great for one image you already have open. It doesn't help you find which screenshot had that text last week.

With Snapok: every capture becomes searchable

Snapok runs Apple's Vision text recognition on every screenshot right after you take it, on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded and there's no API key.

To copy text from a screenshot:

1. Take a screenshot with ⌃⌘A and copy or save it.
2. Open the Snapok library from the Dock or Show Main Window in the menu bar.
3. Right-click the screenshot and choose Copy Recognized Text.

You can also use AI Tools → Recognize Text inside the editor.

To find an old screenshot by its text: type any word into the library search. It matches titles, tags, and the recognized text, so searching for a fragment of an error message brings back the capture that shows it. Read more about the screenshot library.

Going further: translate the text in place

If the text is in another language, Snapok can translate the screenshot and keep its layout. It sends only the recognized text to the model you choose, like Claude, OpenAI, or DeepSeek, with your own key, then paints the translation back where the original was.

Why this matters for developers

Screenshots of stack traces and logs pile up. With on-device OCR, they become a searchable archive instead of a folder of Screenshot 2026-…png files. See how developers use Snapok.

Snapok is free and open source.