#How to text search on mac how to#
#How to text search on mac free#
#How to text search on mac mac#

The interface for scanning different time periods is a little clunky, but it gives you control over when Photos Search hammers the CPU while doing OCR on images, particularly on the iPhone, where Photos Search can scan only while it’s the current app. Once it’s done-and it will take a long time to index a large library-you can search for photos that contain specified strings of text. Running in either macOS or iOS/iPadOS, Photos Search scans the contents of your Photos library and performs OCR on all the text it finds. Photos SearchĪlco Blom’s Photos Search relies on the same core concept as TextSniper, but it gives you a different superpower.

#How to text search on mac mac#

You can also get it for $9.99 from the Mac App Store. It costs $6.99 for a single Mac or $9.99 for three Macs when purchased directly from the developer ( TidBITS members save 25%), and it’s available in the $9.99-per-month Setapp subscription service.

#How to text search on mac free#

I’ll admit that it took me a while to break free of that age-old split between text and graphics, but if you ever find yourself retyping something or living with a screenshot when what you really want is the text inside, give TextSniper a try. In Big Sur, it recognizes seven languages-English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese-and the developers tell me that it may work with other Latin alphabet languages but have issues with accented characters. You can invoke all these features with user-specified custom shortcuts.Īlthough TextSniper runs in both macOS 10.15 Catalina and macOS 11 Big Sur, it can recognize only English in Catalina.

#How to text search on mac how to#

(I’d like to see an option to have it display a notification that, when clicked, opened detected URLs in your default Web browser, just as QR code scanning does on the iPhone.) It can also tap into macOS’s Continuity Camera feature to use an iPhone or iPad to take a photo, scan a document, or add a sketch (see “ How to Take Photos and Scan Documents with Continuity Camera in Mojave,” 27 September 2018). It can also read QR codes and barcodes, putting the detected text on the Clipboard. TextSniper offers a few conceptually related features as well.

For those who work in fields with domain-specific jargon, there’s even a preference screen for adding custom words to the OCR engine’s standard lexicon. If you want more feedback about what you copied, a Text to Speech option reads the copied text. An Additive Clipboard option lets you keep adding bits of text to the Clipboard, which could be particularly useful when extracting the text from a video or slide presentation. You don’t have to replace the contents of the Clipboard on every copy. Choose Capture Text from its menu bar-collection of commands or press its keyboard shortcut, select an area of the screen that contains text, and then paste the text into a document. You can think of it as taking a screenshot of just the text in an image.

Its core function, as I noted, is to perform OCR on any part of the Mac screen on which text appears, copying the selected text to the Clipboard for pasting wherever you want. TextSniper is an elegant little utility for the Mac. Both work well, within the constraints of OCR engines, and provide welcome features. And Alco Blom’s Photos Search offers both Mac and iOS apps that perform OCR on text found in photos in your Photos library, enabling you to find images by the text they contain and copy that text out. TextSniper, from Andrejs and Valerijs Boguckis, promises to perform optical character recognition (OCR) on anything around which you can draw a rectangle, in essence, letting you copy text from onscreen images of any sort. I’ve started using a pair of apps that blur this text/graphic distinction in a helpful way. Those characters are just collections of pixels. It may be perfectly readable, but you can’t select it, copy it, or do anything else with it as text.

On the other hand, although graphics aren’t immutable, you can generally deal with them only at the pixel level (though some vector formats allow object-level manipulation).īut of course, it’s commonplace for text to appear within graphics files. Speaking broadly, you can search, copy, edit, and otherwise manipulate text by the character, word, sentence, paragraph, or document. Work with Text in Images with TextSniper and Photos Searchįor as long as I can remember, there has been a categorical split between text and graphics.

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