How to take a picture and copy text

Have you ever wished you could pull text from photos and videos? Apps like Google Lens and Office Lens offer some level of interactivity, but thanks to a helpful touch of artificial intelligence, iPhone and iPad owners (and Mac users) have built-in support with Live Text.

Introduced in iOS 15, the feature allows you to aim your device's camera at a sign, document, or any other physical object and extract the image's text (supported languages include English, Chinese, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Spanish). It even works on images stored in your camera roll and websites with images that contain text. With the upgrade to iOS 16, you can also pull text from video, and even grab objects from both photo and video captures.

How to Get Live Text

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About Lance Whitney

Contributor

I've been working for PCMag since early 2016 writing tutorials, how-to pieces, and other articles on consumer technology. Beyond PCMag, I've written news stories and tutorials for a variety of other websites and publications, including CNET, ZDNet, TechRepublic, Macworld, Popular Science, Time, Fortune, US News & World Report, and AARP Magazine. I spent seven years writing breaking news for CNET as one of the site’s East Coast reporters. I've also written two books for Wiley & Sons—Windows 8: Five Minutes at a Time and Teach Yourself Visually LinkedIn.

The latest version of the iPhone operating system, iOS 15, has several new features that use artificial intelligence to analyze the content in a photo.

While object recognition has been around for a while, Applesays that its implementation differs because it happens on the device, instead of on a cloud server. Plus, it's built into the operating system.

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One of the handiest applications of this new technology is the ability to copy and paste text from a photo — so, for example, users can take a photo of a page in a book and then grab that text and put it into a document or a note.

It also allows users to call or email more easily by recognizing phone numbers and email addresses that have been written down, like on a business card.

It works with handwritten text as well — Apple's example when it announced the feature in June was turning scribbles on a whiteboard into notes.

Nope! Workbench is 100% free, up to 5 uses a day per user. No license, subscription or even email addresses required.

Will you be adding new tools to Workbench in the future?

Yes! Our team will continue to build out useful resources and release them over time. To get full access to all digital asset management features, check out Brandfolder's DAM software.

How does AI auto-tagging work?

AI auto-tagging is a feature utilized by Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms to help users save time by eliminating manual work, encouraging organization, and making files easy to locate.

The technology works by analyzing objects within an image and generating a set of tags returned from a machine learning system. Based on a confidence score, the tags with the highest likelihood of accuracy will be applied to the image. When used within a DAM software like Brandfolder, metadata and auto-tagging provide a convenient method to search by. You can read more about metadata auto tagging in our blog.

How does the color palette generator work?

The Workbench color palette generator extracts a series of HEX colors from an image upon upload. It counts every pixel and its color, and generates a palette of up to 6 HEX codes of the most recurring colors.

Metadata provides information about an asset's content.

For example, an image may include metadata that describes how large the picture is, the color depth, the image resolution, the creation date, and other data. A text document's metadata may include information about length of document, the author, publish date, and a short summary of the document.

What is Digital Asset Management?

Digital Asset Management (DAM) has, in recent years, become a critical system for companies of all industries and sizes. A DAM is a software platform brands use to store, edit, distribute and track their brand assets. DAMs are intended to encourage the organization of a company’s digital architecture, eliminating the use of buried files and folders typically housed in Google Drive or Dropbox.

DAM systems scale to store massive quantities of digital assets, including but not limited to: photos, audio files, graphics, logos, colors, animations, 3D video, PDF files, fonts, etc. In addition to meticulous organization within the DAM’s central file system, these files are discoverable using unique identifiers such as their metadata and tags (auto and manual).

When used for distribution, DAMs encourage asset permissioning and expiration, ensuring only the correct content is available to the correct recipient for a specified amount of time. Once published or distributed, DAMs can analyze how, where and by whom assets are being used.

Digital asset management platforms are used by marketing, sales and creative teams at some of the world's largest brands. Want to learn more about how a DAM could benefit your team? Sign up for a free Brandfolder trial or schedule a demo with one of our DAM experts here.

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