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Search and copy the text inside screenshots on Mac

On-device OCR · macOS 13 (Ventura) and later

You screenshot things all day — receipts, error messages, chats, slides, code. But once it’s an image, the text is locked away: you can’t search it, and you can’t copy it out. ClipBuddy fixes both. It reads the words inside every image you copy, right on your Mac, so you can find a screenshot by its text and copy that text back out — no retyping, no upload.

Find a screenshot by what it says

Every image you copy is run through macOS’s on-device text recognition. Search “invoice” and the screenshot of an invoice surfaces in your history. Search a name, an order number, an error string — if it’s visible in the picture, ClipBuddy finds it. The recognized text is indexed for fast, prefix-friendly search, alongside all your text clips.

Copy the exact text out of an image

  1. Press ⌘⌥V and open the image clip.
  2. Choose Copy Text. The recognized text appears in a selectable panel.
  3. Select the word, line or block you want — or “Copy all” — and paste it anywhere.

Great for pulling a code snippet out of a screenshot, a number off a receipt, or a quote from a slide.

Get ClipBuddy for Mac →

100% on your Mac

Recognition uses Apple’s Vision framework on-device. Your images and their text never leave your Mac — no server, no cloud OCR, no account. It works offline and keeps your screenshots private.

Screenshot text search is one part of ClipBuddy, a native macOS clipboard manager: a full searchable clipboard history, keyword snippets, a Touch ID vault for secrets and cards, destination-aware Smart Paste, an emoji picker (⌘⌥E), and developer transforms — all on-device.