At a glance
- Two pastes, one item: ⇧Enter gives you the recognised words, plain ⌘V or Enter still gives you the image.
- Any copied image: screenshots from ⇧⌘4, pictures from a browser or Slack, image files from Finder, photos of documents, boxes or signs.
- On-device and offline: Apple Vision does the reading. The image never leaves the Mac and no connection is needed.
- Nothing is consumed: extracting text leaves the picture in history. Do it again whenever you want.
- It feeds search too: find a screenshot by the words inside it instead of scrolling through look-alike thumbnails.
How it goes in practice
The order of the keys is the whole trick. Enter pastes the image, ⇧Enter pastes its text, and both live on the same item, so you never decide at screenshot time which one you will need.
Recognition is not cached at copy time for this. A screenshot you copied yesterday reads fresh when you paste it, so nothing expires and you never re-shoot the screen.
Take the shot as usual. ⇧⌘4 for a region, or copy a picture out of a browser or a chat app, or copy an image file in Finder. Klipto records it in history the same way it records copied text.
Open the popup and pick it. Hold or tap ⌥⌘V. The image sits near the top with a thumbnail.
Press ⇧Enter. The words land in your editor, your terminal, your reply. Numbers off a receipt. An error message the developer helpfully made unselectable. A serial number from a photo of the box it came in.
Accuracy has limits, and they are Apple's. Low-contrast, blurry or heavily stylised text comes back worse than sharp black-on-white. A cleaner screenshot fixes most of it. Nothing here reconstructs text the pixels do not contain.
Live Text, TextSniper and where each one fits
macOS Live Text is genuinely good and costs nothing. Open the image in Preview, Quick Look or Safari, drag across the words, copy. For text sitting on screen right now, that is a fine answer and I use it.
The difference appears once the image is already copied. Live Text wants the image open in an app so you can select inside it. Klipto works from the clipboard item, so there is nothing to reopen and nothing to select.
| macOS Live Text | Dedicated OCR app | Klipto | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Paid, sometimes a subscription | Part of the clipboard manager |
| Extra menu-bar app | No | Yes | No |
| Works on an already-copied image | No, reopen it | No, recapture | Yes, ⇧Enter |
| Keeps the picture afterward | Yes, the source file | No | Yes, in history |
| Read an old screenshot again | Reopen it manually | Recapture | From history |
| On-device | Yes | Usually | Yes, Apple Vision |
| Region capture off the live screen | Selection in an app | Yes | No |
The honest scope: Klipto reads images you have already copied or screenshotted. It does not draw a box on the live screen and read whatever sits under it, which is exactly what TextSniper and similar apps are for. If you want to lasso arbitrary pixels, buy one of those. If the image is already in your clipboard, this is fewer steps. OCR is one of more than 20 transforms that can run on the way to ⌘V.