Use Live Text to Capture Text from the Camera or a Photo

Live Text is a new function for IOS 15 that allows you to capture text that appears in your Camera app or on a photo in the Photos app.

Imagine you are viewing a new recipe in the printed newspaper and you would like to make a shopping list from the ingredients of the recipe.  And you want to be able to keep that shopping list in the Notes app.

With Live Text you can point the camera at the text and your iPhone will read the text. 

It is an amazing function.  

Use the Live Text function of your iPhone with the following steps:

1 Open the Camera app, point your phone at some text.  The subject here is a recipe ingredient list.

2 Wait for a moment and you will see brackets around the text in your Camera screen.

3 Tap on the Live Text icon that appears at bottom right

4 When it pulls the image of text out of the photo, tap on that text image to select text and copy the text.

5 Tap Select All. This will select the entire text block.  It’s OK if the selection is not perfect, it will be easy to edit wherever we paste this text.  

6 Tap Copy.  The full set of actions on the text includes Select All, Copy, Look Up, or after tapping the right arrow, Translate or Share.

The copy action will copy the text so that it can now be pasted into another app like Notes, Messages or Mail. 

Handwritten Text

Live Text was able to recognize handwritten notes on a whiteboard for pasting into another app.  

This is Amazing!!

Summary

Live Text allows you to use the Camera app to recognize and scan text using your camera from from within a photo.