Live Text Not Working on Mac? How to Fix It (and Select Text in Any Image)

You open a screenshot in Preview, try to drag over a line of text, and get a selection box instead. Live Text on the Mac is easy to miss when it is off, and it has more limits than on iPhone. Here is how to check each one.

I build Picture to Text - ExtractText, a free Mac OCR app that reads images, PDFs and any area of the screen on your Mac, and the screenshots here come from it. If you want to try it as you read, get Picture to Text on the Mac App Store.

How do I turn on Live Text on Mac?

1. Open System Settings (System Preferences on older macOS).
2. Go to General > Language & Region.
3. Turn on Live Text ("Select text in images").
4. Reopen the image and move the pointer over the text. It should change to a text cursor.

Why is Live Text still not working?

• Old macOS. Live Text arrived in macOS Monterey. Paused video support came in Ventura.
• The app does not support it. Preview, Photos, Safari and Quick Look do. Many third-party apps and some browsers do not.
• Preview is in the wrong tool. Choose the Text Selection tool in Preview's Tools menu, not Rectangular Selection.
• The language is not supported. Live Text covers a limited set of languages.
• The text is small, blurred or stylised. Zoom in, or use a sharper image.
• It is a scanned PDF with many pages. Live Text works page by page; selecting across pages does not. See copy text from a scanned PDF.

Are there built-in alternatives?

• Shortcuts: the Extract Text from Image action can read an image file or clipboard image.
• Photos: open the image in Photos, where Live Text tends to be most reliable.
• Quick Look: select the file in Finder and press Space, then select text.

When is an OCR app better than Live Text?

• When you want all the text from an image, not a hand-selected part.
• When the text is in an app or window that does not support Live Text: use screen capture with Shift-Command-2.
• For multi-page PDFs, which Picture to Text reads page by page with labels.
• For languages Live Text does not cover: Picture to Text supports 30+, including Urdu, Persian and Punjabi in beta.
• When you want to clean up line breaks, detect links and QR codes, or export a .txt file.

Is Live Text or Picture to Text private?

Both run on your Mac. Picture to Text uses Apple's on-device Vision framework, with no uploads, no account and no tracking. Every method side by side is in how to extract text from an image on Mac.

How Picture to Text helps

• Drop in images or PDFs, paste from the clipboard, or choose several files at once.
• Capture any area of the screen with Shift-Command-2 or from the menu bar.
• Read multi-page scanned PDFs, with each page labelled in the result.
• 30+ languages, including Urdu, Persian, Pashto, Sindhi and Punjabi in beta.
• Clean Up, Detect and Translate: join broken lines, open links, emails, phone numbers, QR codes and barcodes, and translate on macOS 26 or later.
• Private: Apple's on-device Vision framework, no uploads, no account, no tracking, and it works offline.

Download Picture to Text free on the Mac App Store and copy text from anything on your screen.