Google Lens Alternative for PC and Mac: Scan With Your Phone First

The short answer: most text people want off an image starts as paper, or as a photo on their phone. For that, the phone is the faster scanner. Scan the page there, let the phone recognise the text, and send a finished file to your PC or Mac. For text that’s already on your screen, Windows and macOS have built-in tools that copy it. And if you want to know what’s in an image rather than what it says, that’s a job for an image search engine, covered at the end.

Start with the phone: scan, recognise, send

Think about where the words usually are: a letter on the desk, a receipt for an expense claim, a page from a textbook, the whiteboard after a meeting. The desktop route is slow. Photograph it, get the photo onto the computer, crop it, then run OCR on it. A phone camera pointed at the page does all of that in one step.

That’s the job I built Textora for. On an iPhone or iPad:

• Scan. The document scanner finds the page edges and corrects the perspective, and you can scan several pages in one go. You can also import photos, images and PDFs from Photos and Files.
• Recognition happens on the phone. Textora reads the text with Apple’s Vision framework on the device, so the photo isn’t uploaded to read it, and it works without a connection.
• Export in the format the computer needs. A searchable PDF (the scanned page with a text layer underneath, so you can search and copy from it), a Word .docx, plain TXT, Markdown, or CSV for simple tables that paste into Excel or Numbers.
• Get it onto the computer. Save to Files, on the device or in iCloud Drive. On a Mac, iCloud Drive is in Finder, or AirDrop the file straight across. On a Windows PC, open it through iCloud for Windows or at icloud.com.

Textora has no Windows or Mac app. The phone does the scanning and the reading, and the computer gets a file it can already open. It’s free to download, needs no sign-up to start scanning, and runs on iOS 16 or later.

Every scan also stays in a searchable library on the phone, so last month’s letter is a search away instead of somewhere in a Downloads folder.

Text that’s already on your screen

If the words are in a screenshot, an emailed image or a slide in a video call, there’s nothing to scan. Both operating systems can copy them.

Windows: Snipping Tool’s Text actions

Press Windows logo key + Shift + S, capture the area with the text, and open the snip in Snipping Tool. Select Text actions, then either select specific text or use Copy all text. Quick redact blacks out email addresses and phone numbers before you share the snip.

Microsoft’s support page says: “All text recognition processes are performed locally on your device.” The article is marked as applying to Windows 11 and Windows 10 without saying which features appear on which; if you don’t see Text actions, try the next tool.

Windows: PowerToys Text Extractor

PowerToys is Microsoft’s free, open-source set of extra utilities. With Text Extractor, press Win+Shift+T (the default shortcut), drag across any part of the screen, and the recognised text lands on your clipboard, including text inside images and videos.

It can only recognise languages whose Windows OCR language pack is installed, and by default it uses your system language. If a second language comes out as nonsense, that’s almost certainly why; Microsoft’s docs include the PowerShell commands to add packs. The docs don’t say whether anything leaves the machine.

Mac: Live Text in Preview and Photos

Open the image in Preview or Photos, drag across the text, then Control-click and choose Copy Text. Apple’s guide also lists translating the selection, looking up a word, and acting on phone numbers, email addresses and links. For something on screen, capture it with Shift-Command-5 and open the screenshot in Preview.

Apple says Live Text “isn’t available in all regions or languages”; I’ve listed exactly which languages it reads. Apple’s Preview and Photos guides don’t say whether recognition happens on the Mac or on a server.

Where the desktop tools stop

These are built for copying the text in front of you, one capture at a time, onto the clipboard. They don’t keep a history of what you’ve captured, and they aren’t a way to turn a stack of paper pages into one searchable document. That’s the part the phone handles better.

Searching by image and identifying things

This half of Lens needs a large index of images to compare against, which means a search engine on someone’s server.

• Google Lens in Chrome. Right-click an image and choose Search with Google Lens; Google has to be your default search engine. Google’s help page says “a screenshot of the page and page data will be sent to Google,” kept in temporary storage for the query and not used for training.
• Visual Search in Microsoft Edge. Right-click an image and choose Visual Search. Microsoft says it works even if Bing isn’t your default search engine and supports over 100 languages, and its learning-center article says Edge can detect text in the image and let you copy it. It’s still a server-side search, with Bing instead of Google.
• Visual Look Up in Photos on Mac. Apple says it can identify “popular landmarks, art, plants, flowers, pets, and other objects.” Narrower than Lens, but already installed.
• TinEye. For “where did this image come from?” Upload an image, paste one or give a URL, and it finds matches across the web. TinEye’s privacy policy says uploads are kept for a maximum of 24 hours and never added to its index. It’s free for non-commercial use, up to 100 searches a day and 300 a week.

I cover more of these in websites like Google Lens.

Side by side

“Uploads image?” only records what each company documents. Where the official page says nothing, the table says so.

If the image contains anything personal, like a bank letter, an ID or a client document, stay in the “No” rows. The privacy policies of free online OCR sites vary far more than people assume.

Getting the paper onto your computer

If most of your “Google Lens on PC” moments start with a piece of paper, scan it where the camera is. Download Textora on the App Store, scan the page, and export a searchable PDF or Word file to iCloud Drive or AirDrop it to your Mac.

I build Textora. Facts about other products above are taken from their own pages, checked on 16 September 2026; email support@textora.app if something has changed.

Sources: Microsoft Support — Use Snipping Tool to capture screenshots · Microsoft Learn — PowerToys Text Extractor · Microsoft Learn — PowerToys overview · Apple Support — Live Text in Preview on Mac · Apple Support — Live Text in Photos on Mac · Apple Support — Visual Look Up on Mac · Apple Support — Take screenshots on Mac · Google Chrome Help — Search with Google Lens in Chrome · Microsoft Edge — Visual Search · Microsoft Edge Learning Center — Reverse image search in Edge · TinEye tutorial · TinEye privacy policy · TinEye — Is TinEye free to use? · TinEye — Search limits