How to copy text from an image or screenshot

• Use the sharpest version you have. A screenshot beats a photo of a screen, and a scan beats a photo of paper.
• Shoot straight on. Hold your phone parallel to the page, in good light, with no shadows across the text.
• Crop to the text. Logos, pictures and busy backgrounds around the text can turn into stray characters. Crop them out first with Crop Image.
• Turn it upright. Sideways or upside-down text reads poorly; fix it with Rotate & Flip Image.
• Zoom in on small text. Text that's only a few pixels high is hard to read, for people and software alike. Zoom in before you take the screenshot.
• Handwriting is hit and miss. The engine is built for printed text. Neat capitals may work; joined-up handwriting usually won't.
• Tidy up the result. Line breaks follow the image, so paragraphs may come out as short lines. Text Cleaner can fix broken line breaks and extra spaces.

Windows 11: Snipping Tool

Take a screenshot with Snipping Tool (press Windows + Shift + S, then open the capture), and select Text actions. You can copy all the text or just part of it. Microsoft says recognition happens locally on your PC. If you use Microsoft PowerToys, its Text Extractor (Windows + Shift + T) copies text from anywhere on screen, though Microsoft now recommends Snipping Tool instead.

iPhone, iPad and Mac: Live Text

Apple's Live Text finds text in photos, screenshots and the camera view. On an iPhone XS or later with iOS 15 or later, open a photo, touch and hold a word, then drag the grab points to select the text and copy it. On a Mac with macOS Monterey or later, it works in Photos, Preview and Safari: select text in an image as you would on a web page.

Android and Chrome: Google Lens

On Android, open a photo in Google Photos, tap Lens, then select the words you want and copy them. In Chrome on a computer, right-click an image and choose Search with Google Lens. Lens is an online Google service, so bear that in mind for sensitive images.