How to copy text from an image on Mac
You have a picture — a screenshot, a scanned page, a chat photo — and you need the words out of it without retyping them. Here are the free ways to do it on macOS, and when a clipboard manager saves you the repeat work.
The built-in way: Live Text (free, one image)
On macOS 12 and later, Apple's Live Text can pull text out of an image you're looking at. Open the picture in Preview, Photos, or Quick Look, hover over the text, click and drag to select it, and press ⌘C. It's free and needs nothing installed.
Live Text is perfect when you have one image open in an Apple app right now. Where it stops: it doesn't work in many third-party windows, it can't help once you've closed the image, and it handles Arabic unevenly.
The repeatable way: OCR every image you copy
If you pull text out of images often, doing it one at a time gets old. Clipboard Doctor runs on-device OCR on every image the moment you copy it — so the text inside is recognized, copyable, and searchable automatically, without opening each picture.
- Copy the image itself — from a chat, a browser, a design tool, or a screenshot.
- Clipboard Doctor OCRs it with Apple's Vision framework, in Arabic and English.
- Open your history: grab the recognized text, or type a word later and the right image surfaces.
macOS 13+ · on-device · no account · 2-minute install guide
Why copy the image instead of using Live Text?
- Works anywhere — any image you can copy, not just ones open in Preview or Photos.
- Nothing to remember — the text is captured when you copy, so it's there next week too.
- Arabic + English — bilingual OCR inside images, which few tools do and Live Text handles unevenly.
- Private by default — no upload, no account, no telemetry. See the privacy page.
Free, offline, no subscription.
Also a full clipboard manager
Beyond reading images, Clipboard Doctor keeps a deduplicated history of everything you copy, with pinning, tags, snippets, and a global hotkey (⌃⇧W). If your text lives inside screenshots specifically, see searching text in screenshots; for Arabic pictures, see extracting Arabic text from an image.
Questions
How do I copy text from an image on Mac for free?
On macOS 12+, open the image in Preview, Photos, or Quick Look and use Live Text: hover, drag to select, and press ⌘C. That's free and built in for one image at a time. If you copy a lot of images, or Live Text can't select the text, Clipboard Doctor OCRs every image you copy automatically and keeps the recognized text copyable and searchable — free, on-device, no account.
Do I need a separate OCR app, or is a clipboard manager better?
A dedicated screenshot-to-text app is great for grabbing the words out of one image right now. The difference with Clipboard Doctor is that it doesn't just hand you the text once and forget it — it keeps every image you copy, together with its recognized text, in a searchable, deduplicated history. So you can find the text from a screenshot you took last week by typing a word, in Arabic or English, on-device. One tool for copy history and image OCR instead of a separate utility for each.
What if Live Text can't select the text in my image?
Live Text only works inside a few Apple apps and on images you open there. It skips images in many third-party windows, and it handles Arabic unevenly. Clipboard Doctor works on any image you copy — from chats, browsers, or design tools — because it runs Apple's Vision OCR on the copy itself, not on the app you copied it from.
Can I copy Arabic text from an image?
Yes. Clipboard Doctor recognizes Arabic and English text inside images on-device, so you can copy Arabic out of a screenshot or picture and search it later. Arabic support inside images is rare in clipboard tools.
Does it upload my images to extract the text?
No. The OCR uses Apple's built-in Vision framework on your Mac. No image is uploaded, there's no account, and there's no telemetry — everything stays on your device.
Is it really free?
Yes, free with no account. It's a solo-developer tool under the rawag.xyz brand, for macOS 13 and later.
Is Clipboard Doctor a free alternative to TextSniper?
It can be, depending on what you need. TextSniper is a paid, on-device OCR utility: you drag a box around text on screen and it copies that text once. Clipboard Doctor is free and works differently — it OCRs every screenshot and image you copy and keeps the recognized text in a searchable clipboard history, so you can find it again later, in Arabic and English. Both do OCR on-device with no upload. If you want the text kept and searchable rather than grabbed once, and you'd rather not pay, Clipboard Doctor is a free alternative.