How to copy any text on your Mac screen

Text on a Mac screen comes in two kinds. Some of it is real text that you can select, copy and paste. The rest is a picture of text: words inside a photo, a video frame, a scanned page, a shared screen or an app that draws its own labels. This guide covers both, starting with the free tools already on your Mac, and ends with a table that points you to a detailed guide for each source.

Selectable text: the basics people miss

Before reaching for anything clever, make sure the text really can’t be selected. A few habits help:

• Double-click selects a word, and triple-click selects a whole line or paragraph.
• Click, then Shift-click further along to select a long passage without dragging.
• Start the drag just outside the text. On web pages, starting on a word can grab a link or drag an image instead.
• Try Reader in Safari. On a cluttered article, View → Show Reader lays the text out cleanly and makes it easy to select.
• Look for a Copy button. Code blocks, share sheets and many web apps have one.

Watch the pointer as you hover. If it becomes an I-beam over the words, the text can be selected. If it stays an arrow, you’re looking at a picture of text, and that’s where Live Text and OCR come in.

Live Text: where it works on macOS

Live Text is Apple’s built-in text recognition. Hover over words in a photo, and the pointer turns into an I-beam you can drag to select them, just as in a document. It works in:

• Photos, Preview and Quick Look (select a file in Finder and press Space)
• Safari, for images on web pages
• Paused video in apps that support it, such as QuickTime Player

Select the words, then Control-click and choose Copy Text, or press ⌘C. Websites, email addresses and phone numbers also get a small arrow that opens, writes to or calls them.

If nothing happens when you hover, open System Settings → General → Language & Region and check that Live Text is on. In Preview, also make sure Tools → Text Selection is chosen. Apple notes that Live Text isn’t available in every language or region.

What Live Text can’t do is read the live screen. It needs an image or a paused video inside one of those apps. A label in another app, a shared screen in a video call or a game stays out of reach until you turn it into an image.

Screenshot + Live Text: the free method for everything else

Turn whatever is on screen into an image, then let Live Text read it. Sending the screenshot to the clipboard keeps your desktop free of files:

1. Press ⌃⇧⌘4 and drag over the text. The screenshot goes to the clipboard instead of the desktop.
2. Open Preview and choose File → New from Clipboard (⌘N).
3. Drag across the words in the new image and press ⌘C.
4. Close the image without saving it.

It’s four steps, but it works on nearly anything you can see. The Shortcuts app can automate the reading part: a shortcut made of Get Clipboard, Extract Text from Image and Copy to Clipboard turns a clipboard screenshot into text. Extract text from images with Shortcuts walks through building one.

One shortcut for everything

The screenshot route works, but if you copy text off the screen several times a day, the steps add up. That’s the gap Unpixel fills. Press ⇧⌘2, drag over any text on screen, and let go: a paused video, a slide in a call, a scanned PDF, an error dialog or a game. The recognized text is on your clipboard, and a small confirmation shows what was copied.

Recognition runs on your Mac with Apple’s Vision framework, so your captures stay on your Mac. Beyond plain text, a QR code or barcode comes back as its contents, a table pastes into Numbers or Excel as real cells, and holding ⌥ as you let go copies a translation instead. Every capture is also kept in a searchable history in the menu bar, so you can copy it again later.

Pick the right method for the source

Each source has its own quirks. This table lists the quickest free route and the guide that covers it in detail.

What no tool can copy

Some text is out of reach for screenshots, Live Text and screen-OCR apps alike:

• Protected video. Streaming services and some apps block screen capture, so their video shows up black. That’s deliberate, and no capture tool gets around it. Use the service’s subtitles or a transcript instead.
• Text that isn’t on screen. Recognition reads what’s visible. For a long page, capture it in parts as you scroll.
• Hidden values. A password field shows dots, and dots are all a capture sees.
• Tiny, blurry or decorative text. Zoom in first (⌘+ works in most apps), pause on a sharper video frame, and check codes and numbers character by character.
• Messy handwriting. Neat handwriting is often readable; tight cursive and faint pencil usually aren’t.

When text is protected on purpose, such as a document whose owner turned off copying, the right move is to ask for a copy rather than work around it.