How to Extract Text from a Picture on iPhone

Retyping a printed page is the worst kind of busywork. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the text out of any photo or scan so you can copy, paste, and edit it anywhere.

The quick answer

Scan the page or import the photo into an OCR app, run text extraction, and the printed words become editable text. Copy the whole page or just the paragraph you need.

Step-by-step: photo to editable text

1. Capture or import. Scan the document with your camera, or pick an existing photo from your library.
2. Run OCR. In Mobile Document Scanner, tap the text-extraction option — the app reads every line on the page.
3. Copy and use it. Paste the text into an email, a document, a spreadsheet — anywhere. No more retyping.

What kinds of text can OCR read?

Printed text is where OCR shines: books, contracts, letters, forms, receipts, labels. Clear handwriting can work, but results vary — cursive and stylized fonts are hit-or-miss with any OCR engine.

Converting a whole PDF to text

Have a scanned PDF someone sent you? You can convert the entire document to editable text in one tap instead of going page by page — the PDF-to-text tool handles full files.

Turning extracted text into summaries

Long document, short attention span? After OCR, the AI summary feature condenses the scanned document into the key points — useful for contracts and reports you need to understand quickly.