Images and text
Text inside screenshots and images
Recognition runs on your Mac. No upload, no server.
What it does
A screenshot is normally a dead end: the words in it are pixels. ClipBuddy runs Apple’s Vision framework over image clips on your Mac, so those pixels become searchable text and selectable text.
Two things follow from that:
- You can find an image by typing something it contains.
- You can copy a line out of it without retyping it.
Smart actions
When the recognized text contains a phone number, an email address, a link, a date or a postal address, ClipBuddy offers the matching action: Call, Email, Open or Map. That saves the copy, clean up and paste round trip for the most common cases.
Tips
- Search for an unusual word rather than a common one. Error codes, invoice numbers and names find one image, while the finds forty.
- If recognition misses faint text, the screenshot is usually the problem. Capture at full size rather than scaling a window down.
Get the text out of a screenshot
- 1 Find the image
Open the picker with ⌘⇧V and search for a word you remember seeing in the screenshot, for example invoice.
- 2 Open the clip
Open the image clip to see the recognized text laid over the picture.
- 3 Select what you need
Pick the exact word, line or block instead of retyping it.
- 4 Act on it
When ClipBuddy spots a phone number, email, link, date or address in the image, it offers a single tap: Call, Email, Open or Map.
Frequently asked questions
Does the image leave my Mac?
No. Recognition uses macOS Vision locally. ClipBuddy ships without the outbound network entitlement, so it cannot upload anything.
When does recognition happen?
At capture, so the text is already searchable by the time you go looking for it.
Which languages does it read?
Whatever macOS Vision recognizes on your Mac. Accuracy depends on contrast and size, so a crisp screenshot reads better than a photo of a screen.
