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05 · text recognition

The text inside is real text

Pin a shot with ⌘O and it becomes something you can select, copy, and search — no more retyping what you see in a picture.

Plan
Floatie Pro
Shortcut
⌘O

Floatie keeps every capture on your screen as a floating shot. Freeze it and the words inside become text you can select and copy.

⌘O Freeze

How it works

Traceback (most recent call last): File "server.py", line 42, in handle payload = json.loads(body)JSONDecodeError: Expecting value
Drag over the text
01

Pin it and the text reveals itself

Press ⌘O and the shot pins in place while Vision recognizes the text right on this Mac. It doesn't use the network, so it runs at the same speed on a plane. Once recognition finishes, the cursor turns into a text cursor over the text, and you can drag to select it just like on a webpage.

def handle(request): body = request.body payload = json.loads(body) return Response(payload)

Drag over the lines to pick them, then press ⌘C
02

Select and copy, or take it all

Drag over a paragraph to select just that part, and ⌘C copies exactly what's selected. Line breaks and reading order are preserved, so a code block pastes back as a code block. By default, the full text is already on the clipboard the moment recognition finishes, so most of the time you don't even need to drag.

Settings
GeneralShotsAppearanceShortcutsHistoryLink
Text Recognition
Copy text after OCR
Close shot after copying

Recognized text stays highlighted, so you can drag just part of it to copy.

03

Capture, grab it, and get out of the way

Turn on 'Close after OCR' and the shot closes itself the moment the text is copied. That shrinks the whole capture-an-error-and-paste-it-into-search flow to two seconds. When no text is recognized, it stays open instead of closing — you should be able to see why nothing got copied.

When you'd use it

An error message you need to search

Capture it, copy the text, paste it into the search box. Retyping a stack trace is how typos happen.

A phone number inside an image

Select just that line and copy it. No keyboard, no mistakes from copying it by hand.

Text on a video call screen

Pin the shot and whatever slide someone's sharing becomes text you can copy.

Questions about this

Does the image get uploaded?

No. macOS Vision recognizes it right on this Mac, and it works even with the network off.

What languages does it recognize?

Whatever macOS supports. On macOS 14 and later, that covers Latin-script languages plus Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Why does it miss some characters?

Low resolution, heavy compression, and an oblique angle all hurt it. A Retina screenshot reads far better than a photo of a screen.

Pull the text out of the picture

Text recognition is Floatie Pro. 14 days free.

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