Best App To Put Text On Photos For Mac

8 min readJun 23, 2021

Free Photo Apps For Mac
Best App To Add Text To Photos On Mac
Best App To Put Text On Photos
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There’s a new Continuity feature in iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, and it’s so hidden that well, you might have missed it altogether. If you look into Settings, there’s no mention of it. There’s no app for it either. It’s called Universal Clipboard. And it’s a classic Jobsian era Apple feature. It. Just. Works.

How to Add Text to Photos Easily Using Preview in Mac OS X May 16, 2013–24 Comments Adding text to images is a fairly simple process to begin with that is made even easier with Preview, the basic image viewing app that is bundled on all Macs.

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Or so Apple would like you to believe.

Here’s what the feature does. As long as you’re signed into the same iCloud account between all your computers and have Continuity features enabled, you can copy something from one device and paste it on another. Without doing anything extra. And this works between all iOS 10 and macOS Sierra devices.

How It Just Works

It works for both text and images. As it’s technically a Continuity feature, it would require Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to be enabled. But I was able to use this feature successfully even with the Wi-Fi disabled. The Bluetooth and Cellular Data were turned on.

This is a very basic feature. There’s no UI for it at all. There’s no clipboard history. No clipboard manager.

And there are limitations. Thankfully. The cross-device clipboard only exists for 2 minutes. And it’s not permanent. Which means you can overwrite it by copying something else on another device (which is how it should be).

Images Are A Different Story

I have to say, the feature works remarkably well with text. Just copy a link on the iPhone (select text and then tap “Copy”), go to the browser on Mac, paste it (Command + V) and go. It really doesn’t get simpler than this. It’s elegant, it’s innovative, it’s genius.

But images are a whole different story. First of all, you can’t paste images directly into Finder. It will show a progress bar but it won’t actually paste anything.

To actually paste an image, you need to be into an app. Like Keynote or Preview.

To paste an image in Preview, open the app and from the menu bar, go to “File” -> “New from Clipboard“.

You’ll see a progress bar and the image will show up in the Preview window. Then you’ll need to save it to disk.

Safe to say, at least for images, Universal Clipboard isn’t going to be replacing AirDrop anytime soon.

AirDrop has its own issues, yes, but moving multiple images with it is as simple as copy and pasting text with Universal Clipboard. It just takes one tap.

Pro Options

As we’ve established, Universal Clipboard is a very basic feature. It’s awesome but it’s clearly designed for the average user. And if you’re reading iPhoneHacks, you’re no average user.

If you really like this feature but want something more like an actual clipboard history, management, multi clipboard merge, and an actual UI, you’ll be happy to know that there are third party options.

The best is Copied. There’s a $7.99 Mac app and a free iOS app with $2.99 upgrade. But in exchange of better features, you’ll have to do a bit more work, especially on iOS.

Once you’ve copied something you want to send to another device, you’ll need to add the clipboard to the app. It’s pretty easy to do using the Notification Center widget. Copied uses iCloud and it’s actually pretty reliable.

Alternatives are CloudClip (free) and Command-C ($3.99).

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My Experience

I’ve been using the iOS 10 and macOS betas for the past couple of weeks and my experience with Universal Clipboard has been iffy at best. When it works, it’s amazing. When it doesn’t, it leaves you frustrating.

For some reason, it works really well between my iPhone and Mac. But not so much with my iPad. But again, I’ve been using beta so I’ll only be able to make a call after using the stable release for a couple of weeks. I hope this feature works better than AirDrop, at least the text part.

Troubleshooting

Free Photo Apps For Mac

If Universal Clipboard isn’t working for you, do the following.

Make sure you’re running iOS 10 and macOS Sierra on your respected devices.
Make sure Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are enabled on both devices.
Make sure you’re signed into the same iCloud account on all devices.
Make sure “Handoff” feature is turned on in Settings app in iOS. You can find it under “General”.
Sign in and out of the iCloud account.
Try restarting the devices.

Your Experience With Universal Clipboard

How has your experience been with the Universal Clipboard feature in the latest iOS and macOS releases? Do you have any questions about the feature? Fire off in the comments below.

There are quite a few choices on iTunes for apps that can turn images of documents, book pages, business cards, and more into digital, editable text. Our favorite is TextGrabber for its ease of use, accuracy, and reasonable price.

What’s text recognition? It’s technically known as optical character recognition (OCR) and can be really useful when you’ve got a paper document you want in digital, editable form. You need a scanner to create an image of the document first, but then once you have that image you can run it through an OCR application that will read each character and attempt to recreate the original document as text. In most cases it will never be perfect, but with a high-quality scan you can come pretty close. This is even possible on your phone, and that’s why we’re looking at text recognition apps.

TextGrabber

Platform: iPhone
Price: $2
Download Page

Features

Converts images of text to actual text (of course)
Does not require an internet connection to operate
Browsable document history
Use an existing photo or take one with your built-in camera
Recognizes text in many, many languages (although you have to tell it which language you want)
Ability to crop photos so they only contain text and not, for example, your fingers
Save recognized text to the clipboard, send it in an email message, or search for it on the web

Best App To Add Text To Photos On Mac

Where It Excels

TextGrabber pretty much just takes a photo of text (whether it comes from your built-in camera or elsewhere) and turns it into digital, editable text. It has a few other features (described above), but basically it has that one function and that’s about it. What makes it great is that it’s generally very accurate and achieves that accuracy very quickly. It’s not a complex app with a lot of features, but if your primary goal is turning a scanned document, book, or other source into text (or using your phone as the scanner) you’ll be well-served by TextGrabber.

Where It Falls Short

Other apps have more features to try to improve the accuracy of the OCR process. While TextGrabber doesn’t seem to need these features to do a good job, sometimes the picture you end up with isn’t perfect and it would be useful to be able to adjust it. TextGrabber offers a cropping tool, but some other apps will let you set the perspective and contrast to try and create the best source image for OCR. While these features don’t seem to be necessary, they might be useful in certain situations. That said, there really isn’t anything to complain about. 100% accuracy 100% of the time would be nice, but we’re talking about OCR on your phone. The fact that it can even come close to 100% is pretty amazing, seeing as desktop software is about as accurate. The important thing is that you provide the best source image possible. This generally means a flat page with clear text in sufficient, even lighting. If you can do your part and take a good picture, TextGrabber seems to have no trouble doing its job.

Best App To Put Text On Photos

The Competition

There are a lot of OCR apps, some of which use the same ABBYY mobile OCR engine as TextGrabber. Cost varies and so do feature sets. Many are only geared towards scanning business cards, for example, but here we’re dealing with apps that are simply geared towards recognizing text in an image and converting it to digital form. Here are a few others we tested that are worth a look.

ImageToText is a free app and was also very accurate in our tests. What’s a little strange about it is that you seem to need to email your scan or send it to Evernote in order to get the text-based version. If that works for you, the app works quite well and doesn’t cost you anything.

Prizmo, on the other hand, is rather expensive ($10). What you get for your money is a very comprehensive OCR app that is also pretty accurate. We didn’t get results as accurate as TextGrabber or ImageToText, but it was by a small margin and could have easily been a result of a source photo that just wasn’t as good by the same margin. (We used the same page in tests but took new photos with each app as each app had varied requirements and preferences for the camera.) If you want something that can handle regular text as well as business cards, bills, and whiteboards, Prizmo is a really nice option. It’ll also read recognized text back to you, which certainly has its useful applications as well.

It’s also worth mentioning SmartScanner ($1) because it doesn’t appear to work at all. We’re not sure if this is a bug in the current version or what, exactly, but it failed to recognize any text we threw at it. It seems to know where text is, and provides a really nice overlay to demonstrate it recognizes it when you’re taking a photo, but everything we photographed was converted into a garbled string of characters. You should avoid this one.

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