How to search for text inside images and screenshots on a Mac
Updated
A screenshot of a receipt or a photo of a whiteboard holds useful words that ordinary file search cannot see. macOS can read text in images with Live Text, but how well you can search that text depends on where the image is stored.
Copy text out of one image with Live Text
- Open the image in Preview or select it in Finder and press Space for Quick Look.
- Move the pointer over the text. The pointer changes to a text cursor when macOS recognises words.
- Drag to select the words and press Command-C to copy them, or right-click for options like Look Up and Translate.
Live Text works on macOS Monterey and later. It reads one image at a time, so it is good for grabbing a phone number, not for finding which of 500 screenshots mentions it.
Search photos in the Photos library
If the picture is in the Photos app, type the word into the Photos search field. Photos can match text it has recognised in your pictures, as well as people, places and objects. This only covers the Photos library, and recognition runs in the background, so newly imported pictures may take a while to become searchable.
Try Spotlight for files in folders
Spotlight indexes the text inside documents such as PDFs, Pages files and text files very reliably. For screenshots and photos in ordinary folders, it can sometimes match recognised text, but results are less predictable. Press Command-Space and type a distinctive word or two. If nothing comes up, the image may not have been processed yet, or the text may be too small or stylised to read.
Make scans searchable
A scanned document saved as a PDF is often just a picture of each page, with no text layer. Spotlight cannot search inside it until text is added. Many scanner apps have an option called OCR or Recognise Text that adds a hidden text layer to the PDF; turn it on when you scan. For scans you already have, opening them in such an app and saving again adds the text.
Tips that make text easier to find
- Crop screenshots to the part you need. Smaller, clearer text is recognised better.
- Keep screenshots in one folder instead of the Desktop, so you can limit a search to it. See where screenshots are saved.
- Rename important images with a word or two, such as receipt-hotel.png, so a name search finds them even when text search does not.
- Remember that handwriting and decorative fonts are harder to read than printed text.
Search the words in your screenshots with FileSift
FileSift makes the text inside screenshots and scans searchable across your folders, not only in the Photos library. Recognition runs on your Mac with Apple's own text engine, so the images and the text found in them are not uploaded anywhere. You can combine it with plain-English search, such as screenshots this month, and FileSift shows the filters it understood. Matching images appear as large thumbnails, and Space opens a Quick Look preview to check the result.
Text recognition works on what is in the picture. Very blurry photos or tiny text can still be missed, so a short file name for important images is a good backup.
Common questions
Do I need an internet connection to search text in images?
No. Live Text and FileSift's text recognition both run on the Mac.
Can Spotlight search inside a scanned PDF?
Only if the PDF has a text layer. Scans saved as plain images need OCR first.
Related guides
- Where screenshots are saved on a Mac, and how to find one
- How to delete old screenshots on a Mac
- PDF files on a Mac: where they pile up and how to find them
- Spotlight vs FileSift: which to use for finding files
- How to find and delete duplicate files on a Mac
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