Faced with the desire to import recipes from his cookbooks into Paprika, Adam Engst discovers that iOS’s Live Text feature works wonders for scanning recipe text using his iPhone’s camera.

The results are in and wow, do people not use a lot of Apple’s features. In fact, only 4 of 20 features garnered more votes from those who used the feature than those who didn’t. Some of the usage patterns are no surprise—SharePlay, really?—but others caught us off guard.

Mea culpa! It turns out that Apple provided commands for controlling whether dragging in Preview draws out a rectangular selection or selects text. Adam revisits his previous article to set the record straight.

Having trouble dragging selection handles in Preview because Live Text wants you to select text in the image instead? Here’s how to turn off Live Text if necessary.

With the new Live Text feature of iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, any text your device’s camera can see or that appears in a photo or other image can be selected, copied, and pasted like any other text. It’s a brilliant feature, and “Take Control of iOS 15” author Josh Centers explains how and where you can use it.

With these utilities from different developers, you can extract text from any image on the Mac or search for text in your photos on either the Mac or iPhone. Text in images is no longer just pixels.