How to Extract Text From a Screenshot (Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android)
By the UtilityNest team · · 5 min read
Your sister sends a screenshot of a recipe from a cooking app: fourteen ingredients and a long method. You want it in your notes app so you can tick things off at the shop. You start typing "2 tbsp olive oil", look at the other thirteen lines, and sigh.
You do not have to retype any of it. Optical character recognition (OCR) reads the letters in an image and turns them into text you can copy, edit and search. Most phones and computers can already do this, and a browser tool covers everything else.
The short version: on a Mac or iPhone, select the text right in the image with Live Text. On Windows 11, use Snipping Tool's Text actions. On Android, use Google Lens. Anywhere else, or for screenshots you would rather not send to a cloud service, paste the image into Image to Text (OCR).
Option 1: Any device, in your browser
- Copy the screenshot and press Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on Mac) on the Image to Text page, or drop in image files. You can add up to 30 at once.
- Choose the language of the text. There are 33, including English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and you can add a second language for mixed text.
- Pick a layout: Automatic for documents, Single block for a paragraph or receipt, or Scattered text for app screenshots and signs. Keep Enhance image on.
- Click Extract text, fix anything that looks off, then Copy text or Download .txt.
The recognition runs on your device with the open-source Tesseract engine, so your screenshot is not uploaded. The first time you use a language, the engine and its language data download once and are cached, so that first run is slower and needs a connection.
A worked example: the recipe screenshot
A 1170 x 2532 phone screenshot with 14 ingredient lines and a five-step method. Pasted in, English selected, Scattered text chosen because it is an app screen with icons and buttons.
A few seconds later the text is there with a confidence score. Two fixes needed: "1/2 cup" came out as "12 cup", and a heart icon became a stray letter. Copy, paste into notes, done in under a minute.
Five minutes of squinting and switching apps, plus a typo in the oven temperature.
One paste, two small corrections, editable text you can search and share.
OCR keeps the line breaks it sees, so a paragraph often comes out as many short lines. Paste it into Remove Line Breaks with Keep paragraphs to join it back into normal sentences.
Option 2: What is already on your device
Windows 11: Snipping Tool
Press Windows + Shift + S, capture the area, and click the notification to open it in Snipping Tool. Click Text actions, then select the text you want or choose Copy all text. You can also open an existing image in Snipping Tool and do the same.
Windows 10 and 11: PowerToys Text Extractor
Microsoft's free PowerToys includes Text Extractor. Once enabled, press Windows + Shift + T and drag a box around any text on screen, even inside a video or another app's image.
Mac: Live Text
On macOS Monterey and later, open the image in Preview or Photos and select the text with your cursor as if it were a document, then press Cmd + C. It works on Apple silicon Macs and many recent Intel Macs.
iPhone and iPad: Live Text
Open the screenshot in Photos, touch and hold a word and drag the handles, or tap the Live Text button in the corner to highlight everything. Then tap Copy. Available on iOS 15 and later, on iPhone XS and newer.
Android: Google Lens
Open the screenshot in Google Photos, tap Lens, choose Text and select what you need. Lens uses Google's servers, so keep that in mind for sensitive screenshots such as bank or medical messages.
Zoom in before you take the screenshot. Pressing Ctrl and + (Cmd and + on Mac) a couple of times makes the letters bigger, and bigger letters are the single easiest way to get fewer OCR mistakes.
How to get cleaner results
- Crop to the text. Toolbars, icons and photos around the text create stray characters. Crop Image trims them off.
- Pick the right language. English recognition on French text loses accents and misreads words.
- Keep photos straight and well lit. For paper, shoot straight on with no shadow across the page.
- Watch the confidence score. A low score means: read it carefully before you use it.
Mistakes worth checking
- 0 and O, and 1, l and I.
- "rn" read as "m", so "modern" may become "modem".
- Decimal points and commas in prices and measurements.
- Email addresses, URLs and codes, where one wrong character breaks everything.
Tables come out as plain text without columns, so expect some tidying.
What about text in a PDF?
If you can select text in the PDF, you do not need OCR: PDF to Text pulls out the real text, exactly. If the PDF is a scan, the same tool spots pages without text and offers an OCR button for them.
Quick answers
Can OCR read handwriting?
Neat printed handwriting sometimes works. Cursive and quick notes rarely do; the engine is built for printed text.
Is it free?
Yes, with no sign-up. After the first download of a language, it is cached by your browser.
Why did I get nothing back?
The text is probably too small, blurry or low-contrast, or the wrong language is selected. Try a larger, tighter screenshot.