Live Text is perhaps one of the best features Apple has added to its ecosystem in recent years. With a new enough device, Live Text automatically performs text recognition on all images captured in Photos, viewed through the Camera app on an iPhone or iPad, still images in video (with macOS Ventura), and images on web pages in Safari .
Introduced in Monterey, Live Text expanded to search your entire Photos library across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, so you can find any text in any image. For example, I’ve written extensively on printing history, so searching for “Gutenberg” yields a surprising number of matches: Photos I’ve taken of book pages, screen shots, and museum labels—among other images—return matches.
When you double-click a result in Photos for macOS or tap it in iOS/iPadOS to view it, the app dims the images to highlight matching text from your search. It is not immediately clear how to get rid of the marking. Here’s how:
- In macOS, click anywhere else on the image.
- In iOS or iPad, and optionally in macOS, tap or click the Live Text icon in the bottom-right corner of the screen twice: the first time highlights all text; the second removes the mark.
This Mac 911 article is an answer to a question from Macworld reader Lynn.
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