I recently discovered an app that transforms one of the most frustrating parts of working on a Mac: dealing with text you can’t copy. Whether it’s a video tutorial, a Zoom presentation, or a PDF that refuses to let you select text, LensOCR solves this problem by bringing OCR (optical character recognition) directly to your menu bar.
The app enhances macOS’s built-in screenshot capability with intelligent text recognition. When you need to grab text from anywhere on your screen, LensOCR lets you capture, recognize, and copy it in seconds. After using it on my M2 MacBook Air for the past few weeks, I’ve found it addresses a genuine workflow gap that I didn’t realize was slowing me down.
LensOCR sits quietly in your menu bar and activates with a keyboard shortcut. Draw a selection around the text you want to capture, and the app instantly recognizes and copies it to your clipboard. The OCR engine handles everything from printed documents to handwritten notes, and it works surprisingly well with text on video calls, which has become incredibly useful for my remote work with international colleagues where I often need to grab information from shared screens during meetings across different time zones.
Beyond basic text capture, the app includes QR code and barcode scanning, which means you can quickly scan codes displayed on your screen without reaching for your phone. There’s also a drag-and-drop mode that lets you extract text from multiple areas of an image and combine them, useful when you’re working with complex layouts or need to reconstruct paragraphs from non-contiguous sections.
The app integrates with Apple’s Continuity Camera, allowing you to use your iPhone to scan physical documents directly into your Mac. This bridges the gap between physical and digital workflows in a way that feels natural within the Apple ecosystem.
Performance has been solid with minimal system impact. The app requires macOS 10.15 Catalina or newer and is available on the Mac App Store for $4.99. The one-time purchase includes all features with no subscription, which aligns with my preference for straightforward pricing.
LensOCR excels at its core function of text recognition, though users with heavily crowded menu bars might find it adds one more icon to manage. The app doesn’t offer cloud sync or history features, so captured text lives in your clipboard until you paste it somewhere. For quick text extraction tasks, this simplicity is actually a strength rather than a limitation.
If you regularly encounter non-selectable text in your workflow, whether from images, videos, or locked PDFs, LensOCR provides a practical solution that integrates cleanly with macOS. It handles the text recognition task efficiently and stays out of your way until you need it.
