iPhone & iPad
On iPhone: take a screenshot and copy its text
- Press the side button and volume up together to take the screenshot.
- Open it in Photos and tap the Live Text button.
- Tap “Copy All” or select the lines you need.
Screenshot to text
Get selectable text back from a screen capture: an error dialog, a chat thread, a frozen video subtitle or a slide shared in a meeting. Nothing is uploaded, and there’s no account, watermark or limit.
- 1. Drop files
- 2. Adjust
- 3. Download
- No upload. Processing happens on your device.
- No limits. As many files as you like, free.
- No watermark. Your files stay exactly yours.
How to copy text from a screenshot
- 1
Drop your captures onto the drop zone, or tap “or tap to choose files” to pick them from your screenshots folder.
- 2
Check the “Text language” shown in the capture. Leave “Enhance image” on for dark-mode or small captures; switch it off if letters in a very crisp capture come out broken.
- 3
Press “Extract text”, then open “Show text”.
- 4
Use “Copy text” to paste it into a search box, an email or a document, or “Download .txt” to keep it.
Why screenshots are the easiest images for OCR
A screenshot is a perfect copy of what your display drew: flat colors, no lens blur, no perspective, no shadows. Saved as PNG, which most phones and computers do by default, it has no compression damage either. That makes captures the most accurate kind of picture for text recognition, often letter-perfect.
Two things trip OCR up on screens. Dark mode puts light letters on a near-black background, the reverse of what the engine is trained on; “Enhance image” detects this and flips the colors first. Small captures from a standard-resolution monitor have tiny letters only a few pixels tall, so captures under 1600 px on the long side are enlarged ×2 before reading.
Icons, avatars and emoji have no letters, so they are skipped or turn into a stray symbol or two. In chat captures the timestamps and names come out as separate lines; delete what you don't need after pasting.
- Typical format
- PNG, lossless, from the system screenshot tool
- Dark mode
- Detected and inverted by Enhance image
- Small captures
- Enlarged ×2 below 1600 px
- Accuracy
- Usually the highest of any image type
- Ignored
- Icons, emoji, profile pictures, graphics
- Batch
- Drop a whole folder of captures at once
Other ways to do it
Android
On Android: screenshot, then Lens
- Press power and volume down together (on most phones) to capture the screen.
- Open the capture in Google Photos and tap Lens, then Text.
- Tap Select all and Copy text.
Windows
On Windows 11: Snipping Tool Text actions
- Press Win+Shift+S and drag around the area with the text.
- Click the notification to open the capture in Snipping Tool.
- Click “Text actions”, then “Copy all text”.
PowerToys Text Extractor (Win+Shift+T) skips the image entirely and copies text from a region of the screen.
Mac
On Mac: capture with Cmd+Shift+4 and select
- Press Cmd+Shift+4 and drag over the part of the screen you want.
- Click the thumbnail that appears in the corner, or open the file in Preview.
- Drag over the text to select it (macOS Monterey or later) and press Cmd+C.
When to OCR a screenshot and when to copy from the source
If you can select the text where it lives, do that: it is exact and keeps every symbol. OCR is for the cases where you can't, such as an app that blocks copying, a frozen frame of a video or a tutorial, a slide shared in a video call, a photo someone sent of their screen, or an error dialog that disappears when you click away.
Code in a screenshot deserves extra care. Indentation spaces may not survive, and look-alike characters are easy to confuse: lowercase l, the digit 1 and capital I, or the letter O and zero. Straight and curly quotes can also swap. Read the code before you run it, and use “Keep line breaks” so each line stays separate.
For a long article or a chat history spread over a dozen captures, drop them all together. Each capture becomes its own text, and “Copy all text” joins them in order so you can paste the whole conversation in one go.
Frequently asked questions
Does it work with dark mode screenshots?
Yes. With “Enhance image” on, a dark background is detected and the capture is inverted to dark text on white before recognition, which is what the engine reads best.
Can I copy text from a video?
Pause the video on the frame you need, take a screenshot and drop it here. Burned-in subtitles and on-screen titles are read like any other text, as long as they are not too small or set over a busy background.
Will the code from my screenshot run?
Check it first. Indentation may be lost, and characters such as l, 1 and I or O and 0 can be swapped. For Python or YAML, where spacing matters, restore the indentation by hand.
Why do I get random symbols at the start of lines?
They usually come from icons, bullets, checkmarks or emoji next to the text. Crop the capture tighter, or delete the stray characters after pasting.
Should I turn off Enhance image?
Only if the result looks worse than the capture deserves. On a sharp, high-resolution screenshot with dark text on a plain light background, the clean-up step is unnecessary and can occasionally break thin letters.
Can I translate the text from a screenshot?
This page extracts the text in its original language. Copy it and paste it into the translator of your choice; that is usually more accurate than translating from a picture, because you can fix any misread words first.
Related tools
Last updated October 28, 2026