How to Use Live Text with Images on iPhone & iPad

One of the most exciting features for iPhone and iPad with iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 is Live Text. Live Text is kind of like OCR (Optical Character Recognition) but for your images, and it allows you to grab text content from photos, whether it’s a screenshot, or a picture of a handwritten note.

Apple understands that people store a lot of information in the form of image files on their phones. This includes photos of documents, notes, important files, screenshots, and whatnot. Live Text can detect text information from pictures as well as your camera’s preview. Furthermore, you can copy and paste this information wherever you want on your device, just like any regular text.

The best part about Live Text is that it works like magic thanks to the deep neural network technological underpinnings, and you don’t need to go through complicated steps to use it. Let’s take a look at using Live Text on your iPhone and iPad.

How to Use Live Text on iPhone & iPad to Select Text from Images

Before you go ahead with the procedure, check if your device is running at least iOS 15 or later. Secondly, you’ll need a device with the A12 Bionic chip or better to use this feature. As long as you meet the requirements, you can follow the steps below:

1. Launch the Camera app on your iPhone and point it at the written text. You’ll see the Live Text indicator pop up at the lower-right corner of the preview. Tap on it.

   

2. All the text content that the Camera app detected will be highlighted on your screen. You’ll also get access to the text edit options like Copy, Select All, Look Up, Translate, etc. Simply choose what you want to do with the detected text.

   

3. Alternatively, you can grab text information from photos stored in your library. Open an image and long-press on the text to select it. Then, use the ends to select as much content in the picture as you like.

   

4. Tap on “Copy” if you want to copy the content to your clipboard, which you can paste anywhere else in the system later on. Or, choose “Look Up” if you want to find the meaning of a word using the dictionary.
   
5. You can also use the “Translate” option to convert the written text into different languages. You’ll have the option to copy the translated content too.

   

As you can see here, Live Text gives you a ton of options to play around with. The detection is pretty seamless and spot-on, even if the handwriting isn’t the best.

If some of your pictures have a lot of text information, you’ll see the Live Text indicator at the lower-right corner of the image so that you can select all the text at the press of a button.

Mentioned earlier, but you will need an A12 CPU or better on your device to use the Live Text feature, meaning the minimum requirements are iPhone XS, iPhone XR, iPad Air 2019 model, iPad mini 2019 model, iPad 8th gen, or a newer device (iPhone 11, 12, 13, etc) to have this capability available – and yes that means some devices able to run iOS 15 are not able to use Live Text. While Live Text was introduced alongside iOS 15 for devices with the A12 Bionic chip and later, Apple didn’t limit it to the iPhones and iPad. If you own a Mac with the Apple Silicon chip, you can use Live Text in the macOS Photos app or just about any image that opens in Preview or Quick Look if the Mac is running macOS Monterey or later too.

Live Text is just one of the many cool features that iOS 15 brings to the table. Yet another exciting feature is Private Relay which allows you to hide your IP address like a VPN and browse the web securely. Likewise, you can hide your actual email address while signing up for websites with the new Hide My Email feature. Stay tuned as we’ll be covering all of these features are more.

Did you try out Apple’s Live Text feature on your iPhone or iPad? What use cases have you found for this feature? Converting physical documents to digital content, or simply selecting something like a phone number from a picture? Let us know your thoughts, and leave your valuable feedback in the comments section down below.