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I’m finding the Live Text feature on iOS to be incredibly useful. For example, it allows me to copy example sentences from the Duolingo language-learning app if I save the sentence as screenshot.

I’d like to access this OCR data for multiple screenshots, either directly on my iPhone (iOS 17) or via my Mac (Big Sur 10.11).

I presume this data is part of the image files’ metadata, or perhaps it’s stored in sidecar files.

Can I extract this data for inspection or automation?

an image from the iOS (17) Photos app, showing a screenshot from the Duolingo app along with some selected Live Text

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  • Let’s make this macOS only. The toolset on each platform is radically different at the moment. Feel free to ask a second linked question for the other OS if you wish. Commented Dec 26, 2023 at 15:30
  • I appreciate the suggested improvements @bmike, but since I’m primarily using screenshots from my iPhone, I want to include an iOS option. I reversed some of your edits, but I kept some of your other wording. Commented Dec 26, 2023 at 19:06
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    Not writing an answer since this isn't the full answer, but this is going to be live-generated as you view the image, with some spotlight indexing to make it searchable. That spotlight indexing won't modify the original file, and would either be stored in the photos database or in the spotlight database. Commented Dec 26, 2023 at 19:47
  • Good to know, @Ezekiel. How did you discover this? Is it documented somewhere? Commented Dec 26, 2023 at 20:56
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    Thanks for the clarification. So much sharper now and we can hopefully get you some great details. My understanding is that it’s not stored anywhere other than in binary / undocumented form in the spotlight databases. Since live text scanning takes about 6 ms on iOS devices, it’s generated on demand once for indexing and then again whenever you look at an image AFIAK. Commented Dec 26, 2023 at 22:14

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There is an “Extract text from image” action in Shortcuts.

enter image description here

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  • Interesting! I presume that I could use this to loop through a series of images. Is that correct? Commented Dec 26, 2023 at 20:51
  • @EJMak Yes, this should work. Commented Dec 26, 2023 at 20:58

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