How to extract, copy text from photos on iPhone

Advances in technology today can allow you to extract text directly from images captured with your smartphone camera. This is an extremely useful feature and this article will show you how to use it on your iPhone.

Extract, copy text from photos taken on iPhone

In iOS 15, Apple introduced a number of useful new features in the Photos app. While “Visual Lookup” helps you identify and search for information about objects in a photo, “Live Text” lets you extract plain text from a photo. This text can then be copied, translated, or used for searching.

The convenience that Live Text brings is probably unquestionable, and the way to use this feature on iPhone is not complicated. You just need to perform the following operations.

First, enable the Live Text feature on iOS 15, by going to " Settings " > " Camera ", then enable the " Live Text " option.

Live Text is now enabled. Now you will need to take a photo of the text you want to extract using your iPhone camera (if you don’t have one already). Then, go to the “ Photos ” app on your device.

Select the image containing the text you want to extract.

Live Text is automatically enabled. So if Live Text detects and recognizes text in your photo, you'll see a small barcode scanner icon appear in the bottom right corner of the image.

The text that Live Text has identified will be highlighted (bold). You can now handle it just like selecting a regular text on iPhone. Tap and hold to reveal additional options.

Immediately, a toolbar will appear, allowing you to copy, select all, translate, or share the selected text.

That's it! It's a small but handy feature that can save you a lot of time by not having to manually type text in images like before.