How to Use Live Text and Visual Look Up in macOS

Live Text was introduced as a new feature in macOS Monterey and allows you to use text in an image. This is a very useful feature. For example, if you’ve ever been in a meeting or lecture and took a photo of a whiteboard full of written information, you can now select the text in the photo, copy it, and then paste it. in a document.

There are many ways to use the Live Text feature, and it’s a huge time-saving production tool. Live Text is also available on iOS and iPadOS, and since you probably use the cameras on those devices often, you can use Live Text on your iPhone and iPad more than on your Mac. It works in many Mac apps, including Photos, Safari, Quick Look, and Snipping.

Here’s an overview of how Live Text on Mac works on macOS Monterey; it works the same on macOS Ventura and later. You can watch the video below to see it in action, or you can read the article below for instructions on how to use it.

Using Live Text in Photos, Quick Look, and Safari

When looking at an image, move your cursor over the text and the text selection tool appears. (Some apps, such as Preview, require you to switch to the text tool first before you can select text.) You can then select the text, copy it, and then paste it into a document. You also have the option of grabbing the text in the image and dragging it to another app and then dropping the text, as you can see in the gif below.

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Live Text does a very good job with its character recognition. In the gif above, you can see that Live Text was able to recognize the accent on the letter “O”. You may also notice that there are some marks in the corner of the front panel the ‘S’ of SOY; Live Text interpreted this as a bullet point. Also, Live Text translated the “O” in BASURERO to “D”, but it’s hard to fault Live Text because it looks like a “D” in the picture.

igamesnews’s Glenn Fleishman reviewed Live Text and compared it to other character recognition tools, such as PDFpen, Google Docs, and Microsoft OneNote, and found that Live Text produced the best results.

Use of research

With the text selected, you can right-click, display the context menu, and you have the option to search for the text. (If you’re using Safari, the Search selection in the third section of the context menu, under the Save Image and Copy Image sections.)

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Search options are provided and some terms provide more options than others. The options appear at the bottom of the pop-up window and you can click on them to browse the information.

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