One of the most interesting and useful new features in iOS 15 is the Live Text feature . Thanks to this function it is possible to copy and paste text from a photo saved on the roll of an iPhone or iPad or also capture it directly from the device’s camera without the need to save the image.
This function in a way was already present in the devices of the company of the bitten apple, but it was through third-party apps and not integrated into the operating system itself. Apple has wanted to bring this functionality natively and has done it really well. Live Text recognizes text in a masterful way, with very few letter or word recognition errors and also very very quickly by processing everything on the device itself and not sending information to any server.
Copy and paste text from photos on iPhone and iPad
As I said, Live Text is a function that Apple has integrated into the iPhone and iPad through iOS 15. That is why, in order for you to access this function, you need to have at least this version of iOS installed, in addition to meeting other requirements. that you can see at the end of this user guide on how to copy text from a photo or using the iPhone and iPad camera .
- Open the Photos app and load the image you want to extract text from. In case you don’t want to extract the text from a photo and you want to do it from the device’s own camera, you just have to open the native Camera application and point it at the text you want to copy.
- If you want to copy all the text that appears in the image, all you have to do is tap on the Live Text icon in the lower right corner of the screen (this will be the only option in case you need to extract text with the camera ). In addition, if you are using a photo from the reel, you can also directly select the part of the text you want by tapping on it and keeping your finger on the screen for a moment or also choose to touch the Live Text button.
- Once copied, you can switch to any iPhone or iPad application and use the context menu to paste the copied text. To do this, you just have to place yourself in a text field in which you can write (a WhatsApp message, a social network, Notes application or similar such as Notion or Evernote, etc, etc …) and keep your finger on it for a moment. Doing so will bring up the context menu with the option to paste. Optionally, you can use this contextual menu to make the text captures directly and skip the previous two steps. To do this, tap on the Live Text icon when the contextual menu appears and point the camera at the text to be captured; it will automatically appear in the text box ready to send or save.
As you can see, this iOS feature is very easy to use and best of all, it works exceptionally well. In addition, it is important to mention that it is also capable of capturing handwritten text , on many occasions even text that seems unreadable, Live Text does a very good job transforming it into readable and perfectly editable text from iPhone and iPad.
iOS Live Text Compatible iPhone and iPad
As I said before, this function requires the device to meet a series of requirements. One of them is that it is running iOS 15 or later, but in addition to that it also requires the iPhone or iPad to have an A12 Bionic chip or later . This means that the compatible devices are iPhone Xs, iPhone Xr, iPad Air 2019, iPad Mini 2019, 8th generation iPad and the devices that came to the market after these such as the iPhone 11, 12, 13, iPad Mini 2021, iPad Pro, etc, etc …
In the case of Macs, this function is also available, although in this case only on Macs with Apple’s M1 chip and that are also running macOS Monterey or later.