Capture

Copy text from any screenshot on your Mac

Drag a box over the words, click OCR, and they come back as plain text you can paste anywhere, line breaks intact. English and Chinese alike, recognized on your Mac.

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3-day full-feature trialmacOS 14 Sonoma or laterUniversal (Apple Silicon & Intel)

Box it, click OCR, copy. The text keeps its original line breaks.
How it works

How to copy text from your screen with Plumshot

Already took the screenshot? Hover over its Quick Access thumbnail and click the OCR button in the bottom-right corner instead.

  1. Open All-in-One capture

    Click the Plumshot menu bar icon and choose Capture All-in-One. Using it often? Give it a shortcut in Settings ▸ Shortcuts.

  2. Box the text

    Drag a rectangle around the words you want. The screen freezes the moment All-in-One opens (on by default), so hover text and animations hold still while you frame.

  3. Click OCR

    Click OCR on the capture bar. Plumshot reads the text inside the box with Apple's Vision framework.

  4. Copy the result

    The text opens in the OCR Result window, one line per recognized line. Click Copy All, or select just the part you need.

Built-in vs. Plumshot

macOS can read text in images. It just takes a detour.

Live Text, built into macOS, finds the words in images you open in Preview, Photos or Safari. The screenshot tool has no text option, though, so text on screen means taking a screenshot first and opening it in Preview.

For a phone number once a month, that's fine. When grabbing text is part of your day, Plumshot turns it into one move.

macOS Live Text in Preview

  • Take a screenshot with ⇧⌘4; it's saved as a file.
  • Open it in Preview and drag across the words (Tools ▸ Text Selection if they won't select).
  • Control-click the selection and choose Copy Text.
  • Free, but Apple notes Live Text isn't available in every region or language.

Plumshot

  • No detour through Preview: open All-in-One, drag a box, click OCR.
  • Everything in the box comes back at once, line breaks kept, with Copy All.
  • The screen freezes while you frame, so hover text and animations can't slip away.
  • Decided after the fact? Every Quick Access thumbnail has an OCR button.
Where it helps

For text that won't let you select it

Much of what's on a Mac screen is drawn, not typed. Plumshot reads the pixels in your selection, so it doesn't matter whether the app lets you select anything.

  • Error messages and alerts, ready to paste into a search or a bug report.
  • Tooltips and other hover text: open All-in-One with its shortcut and the frame freezes with them still showing. Freezing is on by default; turn it off in Settings ▸ Screenshots.
  • Words inside images: slides, screen shares, scanned pages, photos.
  • Mixed Chinese and English, read in a single pass with no language to pick.
Under the hood

Recognized on your Mac, line breaks and all

Plumshot uses Apple's Vision framework in accurate mode, with language correction on. It runs on your Mac: nothing is uploaded and there's no account. More in the privacy policy.

Every pass reads English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese together, and the text comes back one line per recognized line instead of one run-on string.

OCR is only as good as the pixels: tiny or low-contrast text can come out wrong, so zoom in first when you can and glance at the result before pasting it somewhere important.

Automation

Text capture for scripts and AI agents

plumshot capture-text reads a screen region (--rect), an app window (--app) or an image file (--in) and prints the text as JSON; --no-linebreaks folds it into one line. AI agents get the same thing as the capture_text MCP tool and read the words directly instead of sending pixels to a vision model. Setup is in the agent guide.

The details

Engine
Apple Vision text recognition in accurate mode, run on your Mac
Languages
English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, on every pass
Where to find it
OCR on the All-in-One capture bar, and the OCR button on every Quick Access thumbnail
Result
The OCR Result window: select what you need or click Copy All; line breaks kept
Shortcut
None by default; assign one to Capture All-in-One in Settings ▸ Shortcuts
Permission
Screen & System Audio Recording (Screen Recording on macOS 14). Not Accessibility.
Availability
macOS 14 Sonoma or later; included in the 3-day trial and the $9.90 license

Questions, answered

Can a Mac copy text from a screenshot without extra software?

Yes. Live Text, built into macOS, finds text in images: open the screenshot in Preview, drag across the words (Tools ▸ Text Selection if they won't select), Control-click and choose Copy Text. Every grab means taking a screenshot and opening it in Preview first, though; Plumshot reads the text straight from the area you select.

Does Plumshot upload my screenshots to read the text?

No. Recognition runs on your Mac with Apple's Vision framework. Nothing you capture is uploaded and there's no account. See the privacy policy.

Does it recognize Chinese?

Yes. Every pass reads Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and English together, so a Chinese sentence with English product names in it needs no setting at all.

Can it read text from an image file I already have?

Open the image on screen and box the text like anything else. To process files without opening them, the command line reads them directly: plumshot capture-text --in shot.png prints the text as JSON. See the agent guide.

Is there a keyboard shortcut for OCR?

Not a separate one. Give Capture All-in-One a shortcut in Settings ▸ Shortcuts and grabbing text becomes press, drag, click OCR. After any other capture, use the OCR button on the Quick Access thumbnail.

How much does Plumshot cost?

OCR is part of Plumshot, not an add-on. The 3-day trial includes every feature and starts with your first capture; after that it's a $9.90 one-time license, no subscription. Plumshot needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Details are on the pricing card.

Anything else? Write to support and a human replies. support@plumshot.app

More of what Plumshot does

Stop retyping what's on your screen.

Download Plumshot and try OCR, scrolling capture and everything else free for 3 days. After that it's $9.90 once, no subscription.

Download free trialSee pricing

3-day full-feature trialmacOS 14 Sonoma or laterUniversal (Apple Silicon & Intel)

100% on-deviceNo accountNotarized by AppleSelf-updating