How to copy text from a screenshot
- Press your capture shortcut: ⌘ ⇧ 9 on Mac, PrtSc on Windows and Linux.
- Drag over the text you want.
- Choose Copy text on the toolbar. The toast says how many lines it copied.
- Paste it anywhere as plain text.
It works on things you can’t select: error dialogs, text baked into images, paused videos, slides in a screen share, scanned documents and apps that block copying.
On your computer, on every system
Glintshot doesn’t send your capture anywhere to read it. It uses the text recognition your system already has:
| System | Engine | Setup |
|---|---|---|
| macOS | Apple Vision | None |
| Windows | Windows OCR | None |
| Linux | Tesseract | Install the tesseract package; Glintshot tells you how if it’s missing |
Related features
The same reading powers Auto-redact, which blurs the emails and keys it finds, and smart file names, which name a saved capture after the words in it. For more than the text, such as what an error means or a table in another format, ask a model about the capture.
Questions
Does it upload my screenshot to read the text?
No. Glintshot reads text with your system’s own engine on your computer: Apple Vision on macOS, Windows OCR on Windows, Tesseract on Linux.
Can I copy text from a video or an image?
Yes. Anything you can see on screen can be read: a paused video, a scanned PDF, a photo, a screen share or an app that won’t let you select its text.
How many times can I use it for free?
As often as you like. Copy text is free with no daily limit.