OCR on Mac: every built-in and app option

Yes, your Mac can read text in images, and you don’t need to install anything for most jobs. Apple has built text recognition into several parts of macOS, each covering a different kind of source. The gaps are text that isn’t in an image file yet, and jobs you repeat all day. This map shows what each option covers, so you can pick the shortest route.

Yes, your Mac has OCR built in

Apple’s text recognition shows up in four places: Live Text in Apple’s own apps, an action in Shortcuts, an export option in Preview, and third-party apps. Those apps call Apple’s Vision framework or VisionKit, the developer version of Live Text. Apple says Live Text uses on-device intelligence and that Vision does all its processing on the device, so nothing has to be uploaded.

If none of the steps below select any text, check the switch first:

1. Choose Apple menu → System Settings.
2. Click General in the sidebar, then Language & Region.
3. Scroll down and turn on Live Text, described as “Select text in images to copy or take action.”

Live Text: images you can open

Live Text makes the words in an image selectable, as if they were typed. Where you’ll find it:

Once text is selected, Control-click it. Besides Copy Text, Apple lists Look Up, Translate and a web search, and phone numbers, email addresses and websites get their own actions.

What Live Text can’t do: it only works inside apps that support it, it has no language picker, and tables come out as lines of text. A slide in a video call, text in a game or a message in a dialog box is out of reach until you turn it into an image. Our Live Text guide covers the details and fixes.

Shortcuts: Extract Text from Image

The Shortcuts app has an action called Extract Text from Image. On its own it’s a building block; with two more actions it becomes a handy tool:

1. In Shortcuts, choose File → New Shortcut.
2. Add Get Clipboard, then Extract Text from Image, then Copy to Clipboard.
3. Name it, and give it a key combination in the shortcut’s details.

Now copy a screenshot with ⌃⇧⌘4, run the shortcut, and paste text. Variations can run from Finder as a Quick Action, or from Terminal with shortcuts run. The action has no settings, though: no language choice, no speed option, no QR codes. Step-by-step versions are in extracting text with Shortcuts.

PDFs: what’s built in and what isn’t

PDFs come in two kinds, and macOS treats them differently. A PDF made from a document already holds real text, so Preview selects it with no OCR at all. A scan is a picture of a page, and that’s where recognition comes in.

Built in:

• Selecting text on a scanned page with Live Text in Preview, for a passage or two.
• Adding a text layer to the whole file: in Preview, choose File → Export and select Embed Text. Apple notes the option only appears when no text was recognized in the document before.

Not built in: choosing the OCR language, straightening crooked scans, processing a folder of files, or exporting to Word with the layout intact. For those jobs, see our guide to PDF OCR software for Mac. If you’re not sure which kind of PDF you have, what a searchable PDF is explains how to tell.

Text that isn’t in an image yet

The biggest gap in the built-in tools is everything on screen that isn’t an image file. Think of a shared screen in a call, a remote desktop, a label in an app that won’t let you select it, or a video in a web player.

The free workaround turns the screen into an image first:

1. Press ⌃⇧⌘4 and drag over the text. The screenshot goes to the clipboard, not the desktop.
2. In Preview, choose File → New from Clipboard.
3. Select the words, copy them, and close the window without saving.

It works almost everywhere. It’s also several steps every time, and that’s the problem screen-capture OCR apps solve. They put both steps on one shortcut: drag over the text and it lands on your clipboard as text.

Unpixel, which we make, is one of them. Press ⇧⌘2, drag over anything on screen and let go; recognition runs on your Mac with Apple’s Vision. It also pastes tables as spreadsheet cells, copies the contents of QR codes, and translates as it copies if you hold ⌥. It’s a one-time purchase from $5.99 and needs macOS 26 on Apple silicon. Other apps take different approaches, some free; our guide to OCR apps for Mac compares them by task.

Command line and developer options

If you’re scripting, every route above has a code equivalent:

• shortcuts run runs your Extract Text shortcut from Terminal, with an image as input and text as output. Apple documents the command in the Shortcuts guide.
• Vision: Swift code can call VNRecognizeTextRequest, the request many Mac OCR apps use, with a choice of recognition level and languages.
• VisionKit’s ImageAnalyzer gives an app the Live Text experience itself, including selectable text over images.
• Tesseract, the open-source engine, can be added with Homebrew and works the same way on Linux and Windows.

Recipes for each are in OCR from the command line, and Apple Vision vs Tesseract compares the two engines.

Which should you use?

Pick by where the text is right now:

If you only need OCR now and then, the built-in tools are enough. When the screenshot-then-Preview routine becomes a daily chore, that’s the moment a capture app earns its place.