Screenshots are shots or pictures of screen. Screenshots are mainly used to capture and share visual information displayed on the screen of a computer or mobile device. You don’t need special software to take screenshots or pictures of the screen because the screenshot functionality is built into almost all desktop or mobile OS, Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS.
We can use screenshots to capture error messages, system settings, or other relevant information to help diagnose and solve technical issues. We can use them to create tutorials, share information with others. When copy and paste don’t work with some websites, screenshots come to rescue. Sometimes, we might need to select, copy, edit, search or analyze the text. The text on screenshots or images however can’t be selected or copied. It becomes very hard to pull information from screenshots. We have either manually type them out or run through an OCR program. There is a possibility of errors in the outcomes of both choices.
In this article, we will recommend two free ways to extract text from screenshot or images on an iPhone. They can help make information more accessible, searchable, editable, and analyzable by converting photo or screenshots to text or extracting text from image files, which can be valuable in many different contexts.
Method 1. Copy text from screenshots using Live Text OCR
Since iOS 15, Apple added optical character recognition (OCR) support, Live Text, to the Camera and the Photos apps. Point your camera towards any text, when it notices any text, the Live Text icon appears in the bottom right corner. Tap on it to select, copy, look up, translate, and share recognized text. The Live Text OCR works with those photos and screenshots you’ve already taken or saved in the Photos app as well. This is the easiest way to grab text from screenshots on iPhone. No third-party OCR apps required. However the Live Text feature is only available on recent iPhone and iPad models that are powered by an A12 Bionic processor or better. You’re out of luck if your device is not supported.
Method 2. Copy text from screenshots using Adobe Scan
Adobe Scan is the most intelligent scanner app. Here’s how to turn your screenshots, saved images, photo scans into high-quality Adobe PDF that unlocks text through automated text recognition (OCR).
Run the free PDF scanner app on your iPhone. You will be prompted to login or sign up if it was your first time to use it. You can sign in using your Google account or Apple account. Alternatively use your email address to sign up a free account with Adobe. The Auto-capture mode opens your camera so you can quickly scan any thing to PDF using your iPhone.
We are going to convert screenshots and images to text on iPhone, so tap the image icon at the bottom-left corner to find and load the screenshots into the scanner app. The PDF scanner app can automatically detect and find photos of documents for you.
Once the screenshots were added to Adobe Scan, tap the Save PDF button at the upper right corner to convert the screenshots to PDF on iPhone.
The free scanner app to automatically upload the PDF to Adobe document cloud server and perform OCR. After that open the PDF in Adobe Scan, you can then select and extract text from them. Tap on Text actions, then choose Copy all text, or manually select text from the PDF, then tap on Copy selected text. Once the text has been copied to the clipboard, you can paste it to other apps or share it with others.
