Someone sends you a photo of a whiteboard covered in meeting notes. Or you screenshot a recipe from an Instagram story. The text is right there on your screen, but you can't select it, can't copy it, can't paste it anywhere useful. Your only option is to retype every word manually — and hope you don't introduce typos along the way.
Why You Can't Just Select Text in an Image
Images are pixels, not characters. Your Mac sees a JPEG or PNG as a grid of colored dots, not as words and sentences. Preview lets you annotate images but won't extract their text. Quick Look shows you the image but offers no copy functionality for the words inside it. Even dragging the image into Notes or Pages just embeds the picture — the text stays locked behind pixels.
Apple's Live Text feature works in some contexts, but it requires compatible apps, specific image formats, and doesn't cover every scenario. If the text sits inside a browser tab, a design mockup, or a video frame, Live Text often can't reach it.
Drag to Select, Copy Instantly with Optic
Optic lives in your menu bar and lets you draw a selection rectangle over any part of your screen. It reads the characters inside that rectangle instantly — no matter whether the source is an image file, a web page, a PDF, or anything else visible on your display.
Photos and Screenshots
Open the image in any app — Preview, Photos, a browser, Slack — and drag a selection over the text. Optic recognizes the characters and copies them to your clipboard. Works with handwritten notes, printed documents, signs in photographs, and text overlaid on graphics.
Design Files and Mockups
Reviewing a Figma export or a flat design comp? Drag over the text elements to extract copy without asking the designer to send it separately. Useful for QA, translation workflows, and content audits.
Capture History
Every capture is saved in the menu bar, so you can go back and grab text you extracted earlier without re-scanning. No need to paste into a scratch document just to hold onto it.