How to copy text from a screenshot on Windows and Mac

Someone sends you a screenshot of an address. A tutorial video shows a command you need. An error message only exists in a picture. Typing it all out by hand feels wrong because it is — every major platform can pull text out of an image now, mostly for free. Here are the ways that actually work, fastest first.

Windows: PowerToys Text Extractor

If you have Microsoft PowerToys installed (free, made by Microsoft), press Win + Shift + T, drag a box over any text on screen — inside a screenshot, a video, anything — and it lands on your clipboard as text. This works on the live screen, so you don't even need to open the screenshot file.

Install PowerToys from the Microsoft Store (search “PowerToys”)
Press Win + Shift + T
Drag over the text → it's copied. Paste anywhere.

Windows: Snipping Tool's built-in text actions

Windows 11's Snipping Tool grew this ability too. Open any screenshot in Snipping Tool (or take a new snip), click the Text Actions button in the toolbar, and it highlights every word it can read. You can copy all of it or select just a part. No extra installs, though it's a few more clicks than PowerToys.

Mac: it's already built in

macOS has had this since Monterey and it's genuinely seamless: open the screenshot in Preview (or even Quick Look with the spacebar), and just… select the text with your cursor, like it was a document. Copy with ⌘C. Apple calls it Live Text and it works in Photos, Safari, and basically anywhere an image shows up.

Any platform: Google Lens in your browser

No installs, works on a locked-down work machine: go to images.google.com, click the camera icon, upload the screenshot, and hit “Text”. Accuracy is very good, even on low-quality photos of screens. The trade-off is you're uploading the image to Google — skip this one for anything sensitive.

warning

A word on sensitive screenshots: web-based OCR tools upload your image to someone's server. For screenshots with passwords, internal dashboards, or customer data, stick to on-device options — PowerToys, Snipping Tool, and Live Text all process locally.

The catch with all of these: one screenshot at a time

Every method above works on the screenshot in front of you. None of them help with the real problem: the text you need is in some screenshot, taken weeks ago, filename unknown. You can't OCR your way through 900 files one by one.

That's the case for tools that read every screenshot as you take it and keep the text searchable. Then “copying text from a screenshot” becomes: search a phrase you remember, open the shot, click copy.

bolt

Copy text from any screenshot you've ever taken

SnapSaw reads every screenshot the moment you capture it. Search for a phrase you half-remember, open the match, and hit the Copy Text button — even if the screenshot is months old.

downloadTry SnapSaw freeFree for 200 screenshots · Windows & macOS · no credit card

Which one should you use?

For a one-off on Windows: PowerToys Text Extractor. On a Mac: just select it, Live Text is already there. On a machine you can't install anything on: Google Lens, minus anything confidential. And if you take screenshots all day and keep needing text out of old ones, automate it once and stop thinking about it.