You need to copy an address from a photo of a business card, a scanned envelope, a screenshot of a contact page, or a delivery confirmation image. The address is clearly printed — street, city, state, ZIP — but because it's in an image, you can't click on it, can't select it, can't copy it. You have to read each line and type it into your map app, your contacts, or your shipping form. One mistyped digit in a ZIP code and the package goes to the wrong place.
Addresses in Images Require Perfect Manual Transcription
Addresses are particularly risky to retype. They contain a mix of numbers, street name abbreviations, unit numbers, and postal codes — all of which must be exact. Transposing two digits in a ZIP code or misspelling an apartment number means failed delivery or misdirected mail. And unlike most text, you can't easily verify an address by reading it back — you need to compare character by character.
macOS provides no built-in workflow for extracting an address from an image. Live Text might highlight addresses in some Photos images and offer to open them in Maps, but this only works in specific Apple apps, with clean images, and it extracts to Maps — not to your clipboard for pasting elsewhere.
Drag Over the Address, Paste It Anywhere
Open the image containing the address in any app — Preview, Mail, a browser, Slack — then activate Optic from the menu bar and drag a selection around the address. The complete text — every line, every number, every abbreviation — is copied to your clipboard. Paste it into Google Maps, a shipping form, your contacts, or an email.
Business Cards
Photos of business cards from networking events are notorious for sitting in your camera roll without their addresses ever making it into your contacts. Open the photo, select the address with Optic, and paste it directly into the contact entry. Works for phone numbers and email addresses visible on the card too.
Shipping and Returns
Return shipping labels, delivery confirmations, and packaging photos often contain addresses you need to reference or reuse. Extract the address from the image and paste it into your shipping platform without retyping.
Real Estate and Directions
Listing photos, property flyers, and scanned documents in the real estate process are full of addresses. Grab any address from these images and paste it into your maps app for directions or into a spreadsheet for tracking.