Clean up your notes and notes by copying text from an image from iOS and Android

Obtain text from an image. That is, you make a photograph of a sheet of papertyped or handwritten, and from that image extract the text to be able to edit it on a device that has a text editor. Getting text out of an image is very easy today if you have the right application. And you just need an Android phone or an iPhone and some time.

The times of the scanners. Waves photocopiers. Past times in which to clear notes and notes You had to rewrite those texts as if you were a copyist in an old medieval monastery. When OCR technology arrived, things improved: you could scan paper documents and extract its content into editable text by a computer. But it had to be typed.

Nowadays everything is simpler. Both Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS integrate image recognition functions capable of recognize text that appears in front of the camera. And in real time, or in a photograph, process that text to copy it, share it, translate it or search for it on the internet. This way you can clean up notes and notes, by machine or by handto have them in a digital document more convenient for editing and sharing.

Extract text from an image from Android

Google Lens is the name of the technology that makes it possible for your Android phone to recognize the texts that appear on a photograph, poster or wall and process them to do whatever you want with them. Directly from the camera or from a saved image or downloaded.

Depending on the version of Android you have installed, you may need to download Google Lens separately. But in newer versions, Google Lens is integrated into Android. Perfect for getting text out of an image. And you can use this useful feature in Google Chrome, from the Camera app or in the Photos app. you will even see the Google Lens icon in the Google search engine when you are looking at images that contain text. Or in the Google Android app.

To extract text from an image from Android:

1. Open the app Photos
2. Go to Library and find the image that contains the text
3. Open the image. The message will appear Copy text from image
4. Click on Copy text from image
5. You will see several options: copy the text, search on Google, read the text aloud, translate it…

Google Lens works perfectly with typed text. Especially if there is color contrast between background and text. But it also recognizes handwritten text if it is legible enough. All in all, if you manage to extract part of the text you will have saved time instead of copying everything yourself.

live texteither LiveText In English, it is a feature of your iPhone that Apple introduced in iOS 15 and that has made our lives easier since then. Using the camera, “you can copy, share, search and translate the text that appears inside the camera frame.” Furthermore, from the application itself Camera integrates “quick actions to easily call phone numbers, visit websites, convert currencies and much more, based on the text that appears in the box.”

And you can also use live text from Photos and other compatible applications to extract text from an image or photo. This way your iPhone will act as a scanner. Basically, when you focus on text with the camera or open an image with text, the live text icon will appear in the bottom right corner. By clicking on that icon, highlighted text will be displayed.

Live text can be activated from Settings > Camera > Show detected text. It is available on any iPhone with iOS 15 or later. It also works on iPad with iPadOS. And on Mac with macOS. And it is compatible with Spanish, English and other languages. Although, at the moment, it is not available for Catalan, Galician or Basque.

To extract text from an image from iPhone:

1. Open the app Photos
2. Enter the image that contains the text
3. When the icon appears live textpress it
4. Press on the button Copy all
5. Now you can paste that text in Notes, Pages, Messages or another app to edit text

To extract text from iPhone camera:

1. Open the app Camera
2. Focuses on the document, poster, or element containing the text
3. When the icon appears live textpress it
4. There are several things you can do with that text: copy it, share it, search for it on the internet, translate it…

Live text works perfectly with typewritten text. But, curiously, it also gets along well with handwritten texts, handwritten. As long as the background is light and the text is dark. And, if the handwriting is legible. The more illegible, the more it costs this technology remove text from image in conditions.