There are many ways to copy text that can’t be easily selected, but few that are as simple and fast as Text Lens ($6)—a new Mac app by prolific developer Sindre Sorhus. Text Lens lets you select any part of your Mac’s screen and automatically copy all of the text from that part. This makes it easy to copy text from images, videos, scanned pages, settings menus, and other types of text that are otherwise impossible to grab.
Text Lens vs. Apple’s Live Text
Live Text, which is built into macOS, allows you to capture text from screenshots. While it’s good enough to get you started, it works only with Safari, Preview, and the built-in screenshot tool. You can’t select text from other apps without taking a screenshot first, which adds an extra step to the process. With tools such as Text Lens, you can instantly go into selection mode to capture and copy text. There’s no need to take a screenshot and then extract text.
Using Text Lens on your Mac
Credit: Pranay Parab
Text Lens is simple and fast, but you should take a moment to configure it to make the most of the app. Once you’ve installed the app, click its menu bar icon and go to Settings. In the General tab, enable the following options:
Next, go to the Shortcuts tab and record keyboard shortcuts for this app. You can even use Raycast’s Hyper Key to quickly create unique shortcuts. Once this is done, you’re ready to use the app. Try either its keyboard shortcut or click the menu bar icon to fire up the selector. Click and drag to cover the area you want to copy text from, and release the mouse when you’re done.
Text Lens will show a popover to confirm if the text has been copied to your clipboard. (In case it fails to copy, the same popover will tell you that no text was detected.) Once it’s successful, you can now paste the text in any app and carry on with your day. This app supports 18 languages including English, French, and Spanish.
Text Lens will also allow you to copy text from saved files on your Mac: You can import images, PDFs, or other files, and Text Lens will copy everything on the page. The app can also copy text from images in your clipboard.
What do you think so far?
Credit: Pranay Parab
While I was quite impressed with Text Lens’ accuracy with smaller bits of text, I imported a few larger batches of text to see how it works. For this, I compared it with the results from TextSniper ($11.99 for unlimited license) and Cleanshot X($29), two other Mac apps that let you copy text from images. I used one of my invoices to see how all three apps handle formatting challenges, and at the end of the quick test, TextSniper did the best job with the file.
Text Lens and Cleanshot X were able to capture text from the invoice fairly well, but they both included a few typos and messed up the formatting. Both these apps listed all the items and dates first, and lumped together the prices at the end. Meanwhile, TextSniper listed each item, its date, and the price together. It also had the fewest typos.
Still, for basic text copying, Text Lens does a fairly good job and is priced quite well. I hope that it gets better at copying large amounts of text in the future, but for copying a few lines here and there, it will do what you need it to do without much of a fuss.
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