• From other apps: Import photos and videos sent to you in an email or text message, or downloaded from Safari. See Import photos from Mail, Safari, and other apps. By default, imported photos are copied into the Photos library. If you prefer, you can store photos and videos outside the Photos library—for example, in a folder on your Mac or on.
• Movavi Photo Editor. Movavi is a full-featured photo editing tool designed for both beginners.
• Open the image you would like to caption from within the Preview app located inside of your Applications folder. Go to the View menu and select 'Show Edit Toolbar' or push Command-Shift-A to bring up the Edit Toolbar. Click on the text tool within the toolbar and then click on the photo to create your text.

Phonto is a simple, free app that gives you plenty of opportunities to dress up your images with text in a large variety of decorative fonts, or to add text inside thought bubbles, placards.

Whether you’ve just taken a weekend trip up North or the European vacation of your dreams, you’re guaranteed to return home with a massive amount of photos, probably a handful of videos, and, if you were feeling particularly artsy, half a dozen time-lapses.

But now that you’re home, what are you going to do with all those pictures? Where are you going to keep them? How are you going to share them?

Enter the Photos app for Mac.

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What is Photos on Mac?

The Photos app is a convenient home for all of your pictures and videos. Anything you shoot, Photos will store it and — better yet — organize it, so you can actually find said pictures when you feel like reliving the memories.

In this post, we’ll go over the basics of using Apple’s Photos app. We’ll talk about where to find photos on your Mac and how you can manage your ever-growing photo library. And of course, we’ll cover all the features Apple has built into this underrated app.

iPhoto vs Photos: What’s the difference?

Those of you familiar with iPhoto for Mac are probably wondering what makes its successor so special. And to oversimplify it, Photos is the next step in photo management — and a giant step at that.

Prior to Photos, Apple made two apps for managing pictures and videos. iPhoto, for those of us less experienced in photography, and Aperture, for the ones looking to do some heavier editing. Photos perfectly blurs the line between those two apps, combining the best of both while adding new features like iCloud Photo Library and iCloud Photo Sharing.

If you used iPhoto before, Photos will feel instantly recognizable. You’ll have your pictures, albums, and collections in the main window, a navigation sidebar to the left, and different viewing options at the top. However, a significant point of difference between iPhoto and Photos is the app’s performance. When working with larger libraries, iPhoto had the tendency to lag or choke up and had arbitrary limits that would restrict album and collection sizes. Photos gets rid of those limitations entirely and is able to handle much larger libraries than its predecessor. While the look of Photos may be the same, it feels like a faster and more powerful app.

Where are the photos stored on Mac?

The Photos app maintains pictures and videos in its own library, making it easy to view the content, but confusing to access the actual files. To find the photos on your Mac, you’ll need to find that Photos Library first:

1. With the Photos app open, click on Photos in the menu bar
2. Then go to Preferences > General
3. At the top of the window, you’ll see Library Location. Click the Show in Finder button.

The first thing you’ll notice after you find the Photos Library file is you can’t do much with it. You can double-click it, but that opens Photos again. If you want to find the original files of your pictures and videos, you’ll need to:

1. Right-click on Photos Library to open the alternate menu
2. Select Show Package Contents from that menu
3. Open the Masters folder
4. All of your pictures and videos live in this folder, organized by year, month, and date

How to use Apple’s Photos app

When you open Photos for the first time, the app offers you a glimpse of what your library will look like with all your pictures and videos imported. You get a quick intro to some of the features and tools, and learn how you can make these memories tangible through printed objects like calendars, photo books, and more.

Once you’ve finished the tour of the app and gone through the initial setup, you’re all set to start importing your pictures and videos!

How to import photos to Mac

There are several ways you can import your media content to Photos, depending on where you’ve been storing it.

From your iPhone or a digital camera

1. Connect your iPhone or camera to your Mac with a USB cable. You might need to unlock your iPhone with your passcode, and then tap Trust when prompted to Trust This Computer.
2. On your Mac, if the Photos app doesn’t open automatically, go ahead and open it.
3. The Photos app will show you an Import screen that has all the photos and videos on your iPhone or camera. If you don’t see the Import screen, click on your iPhone or camera in the Photos sidebar under Devices.
4. From here you can either choose to Import All New Items or select a batch and click Import Selected.

From a folder or an external hard drive in Finder

You have a couple of options here. If your pictures and videos live on an external hard drive, you’ll want to make sure it’s connected first. Then, you’ll want to do one of the following:

• Drag the files from your drive into the Photos window
• Drag the files from your drive onto the Photos icon in the Dock
• In Photos, go to File > Import from the menu bar. Choose the photos or videos you want to import and click Review for Import.

An important thing to know about Photos is that the app copies the pictures and videos into the Photos Library we talked about earlier, leaving the original file either on your device or in its folder.

Tabs in Photos: Library, Albums, Projects

Have you ever been unable to find a specific picture because you couldn’t remember when you took it? You can remember everything else about the photo, things like where it was taken and who was in it, but not the one thing you need to navigate your files.

The Photos app helps you with this predicament by organizing your pictures not only by date, but also by event, location, and even by people’s faces. In the sidebar, you’ll find a number of tabs designed to make sorting through your pictures easier.

Memories. Photos creates “memories” based on who is in a series of images as well as when and where those pictures were taken.

Favorites. These are the pictures you’ve gone through and clicked the heart icon on, marking them as your favorites.

People. This is where you’ll be able to see all the pictures of you have of specific people.

Places. This is where you can see all the pictures you’ve taken in specific locations.

Shared. This section is where you’ll find all the albums you’ve shared with other people and the albums that have been shared with you. (Check out our guide to iCloud Photo Sharing for more info on Shared Albums.)

Albums. If you want to group certain pictures for easy navigation, you’ll want to create a new album. This section is where you can access those albums.

How to tag people in photos

If you want to tag someone in a specific picture:

1. Open the photo in the Photos app
2. Click the info button in the top right corner.
3. At the bottom of the info window, you’ll see circles with faces at the bottom. Tap on one of those.
4. The face will now be circled on the photo. Underneath the circle will be a text box labeled “unnamed.” Click on the text box and type the person’s name.

If the person you’re tagging has already been tagged in your Library, their name should appear under the circle on the photo.

How to share pictures from the Photos app

The Photos app on Mac has made it easier than before to share your pictures. Just select the photos you want to share and click on the Share button in the top right-hand corner. You’ll see a list of options:

• Shared Albums
• AirDrop
• Messages
• Notes
• and more, depending on what apps and accounts you set up on your Mac

Tap on your preferred option and proceed to send the pic or create a Shared Album.

Now that you’ve gotten a feel for how to use Photos on Mac, it’s time to give it a spin. Once you’ve got your library set up and organized, you’ll see how easy it is to relive and share your memories with Photos.

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Make your Mac invincible

Sometimes you just need to copy text from an image. Maybe you want to grab a phrase from a screenshot, drop-down menu, error message, or pop-up window that doesn't allow text selections. It could also be a filename, file size, or date modified stored in a file directory.

In such cases, if you try to simply copy the text, you'll notice that it won't work. Even if all text may seem the same to you, there is a big difference between real text and text embedded in a graphic for your computer.

That said, being able to copy text from images will save you the time required to manually transcribe the words into your word processor. Luckily, it only takes a few steps to convert an image to text. There are apps that analyze letters in an image and convert them so that you can easily transfer and edit the text on your Mac. Here's how the process goes.

Ways to convert picture to text

There are a few ways you can copy the text you are after. Obviously, trying well-known shortcuts like Command + C and Command + V should be your first options, just for the speed and ease of it. But if they didn't work — read on.

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Copy the text from pictures using OCR

Are you looking to extract text from images, photos, or design mockups and make it editable? It's not difficult. But first, you'll need an application that can recognize text via OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Prizmo is the perfect tool for that and acts as a powerful scanner to convert image text into usable text in seconds. To copy the text you need from images:

1. Click the plus icon and select an image source from the drop-down menu
2. Highlight the images you want to bring into Prizmo and they will appear on the left side of the window
3. Click Crop and eliminate any image distortions by using the frame and grid icons
4. Using the Adjust button, change the sharpness or contrast of the text to increase readability
5. To begin the OCR process, click Recognize
6. Review the extracted text on the right side of the app window to correct any formatting errors

Convert jpg/png to text

The same flow can be used with your jpg/png images and screenshots as well.

If you don't have Prizmo to read your image, you can use a PDF reader with OCR support instead. In this way, to convert image to text would mean to turn it to PDF and then copy text from a PDF. Here's how you quickly turn a jpg/png to PDF:

Apps To Add Text To Photos Mac Os

1. Open your image in Preview.
2. Go to File and choose Export as.
3. Select PDF as an output format.

To quickly copy text from a PDF, you can use tools like PDFpen, an advanced PDF editor for Mac. The app allows to copy as well as edit and insert rich text along with the formatting. So you own the flexibility here.

Read receipts and invoices

If you need an OCR tool to simplify your accounting on Mac, you can use Receipts app for the job:

1. Drag your image of PDF right into the Receipts window.
2. Set the app to extract data like document date, bank connection, and taxes.
3. Organize and filter your receipts by tags and categories flexibly.

How to make a scanned PDF document searchable

Although PDFs are commonplace on our computers, it's still hard to edit them. It can even be difficult for your computer to recognize text in a scanned PDF to copy it. For this, you'd most likely need to use OCR software.

If you want to make a scanned PDF searchable, you can start by trying to use what you already have in macOS and then graduate to professional OCR software, such as Prizmo and PDF Search, for more flexibility.

Reading PDFs with built-in macOS tools

Preview is the most common tool to read and manage PDFs on Mac. And the good news is, a lot of PDFs are scannable by default, so you can just open them in Preview and copy-paste everything you need:

Unlike standard clipboarding, Paste apps allows you to copy-paste multiple items:

1. Copy everything from images to text snippets just the way you used to
2. Retrieve anything you've copied by clicking Show Paste in the menu bar or using a shortcut Command + Shift + V

If, however, your PDF file is a scanned or image-based document, you won't be able to make changes to the file, as Preview doesn't have an OCR feature (use Prizmo for that). In this case, you could use the native TextEdit app to extract the text you need.

1. Open the PDF file. While the Preview app is the default PDF viewer on the Mac, you can also use other PDF viewing applications, such as Adobe Acrobat.
2. Select the entire PDF by clicking Edit and Select All, or you use Command + A
3. Copy the contents of the PDF by clicking on Edit and Copy in the menu or using keyboard shortcut Command + C
4. Open the TextEdit app located in Applications or use the macOS search bar to find it
5. In the left corner of a new window, open a New Document
6. Change the TextEdit to Plain Text Mode by clicking on Format and Make Plain Text or pressing the keyboard shortcut Shift + Command + T
7. Paste the contents of the PDF by clicking Edit and Paste from the menu or pressing on Command + V. As the TextEdit is in Plain Text Mode, you'll only see the text that you've pasted and none of the images or formatting from the original PDF.
8. You may be need to fix up some of the spacing errors after pasting the text

Extract text from a scanned PDF

Alternatively, you might just need to find a piece of text in a large PDF document. In some cases, a simple Command + F lookup could do wonders, but if the PDF was sourced from images, your only way is to go with some professional software like PDF Search.

PDF Search is an app that will allow you to scan through hundreds of PDF pages to find exactly what you're looking for with lightning-fast results. PDF Search does more than find matches for your search terms: it also looks for multiple combinations and checks for related terms.

If you need a powerful tool that will let you see whether a word appears in a heading, subheading, or body paragraph, PDF Search will allow you to find the most relevant results. You'll also be able to convert office documents to PDF.

Best apps to convert picture to text

Get a huge set of top apps to recognize, annotate and edit scanned documents on your Mac. Best utilities in one pack, give it a go!

Being able to quickly grab text from an image or PDF and edit, save, or make any other changes to it can make a big difference for your word processing productivity. OCR apps make it possible to recognize text embedded within a graphic and turn it into a text file you can edit so that you can easily convert an image to text or make a scanned PDF searchable.

Copy text from image online

If you want to extract text from image without using any OCR tools, you can do it online. Google Drive gives you free OCR help in minutes. Although it may not render the formatting properly, you get editable text from any image — including screenshots.

Here's how you turn picture to text with Google Drive:

1. Access your drive and click New > File upload.
2. Once you upload an image, right-click on it and select Open with > Google Docs.

The new tab with a Google Docs document will open automatically. To convert some scanned copy into text:

1. You'll see an image and editable text extracted from it at the bottom.
2. Make the edits if necessary and delete the image.
3. The doc with the text will be accessible from Google Drive

Note that this flow comes handy with short pieces of text. The more text you extract, the more mistakes it will have.

How to manage digital notes on Mac

Converting handwritten notes to digital is an easy deal if it happens on iPad. Apple Pencil works with numerous note-taking apps, allowing you to draw or write and transform your writing into digital notes. The good news is, you can use iPad and Apple Pencil alongside Mac — as an extended workspace — on macOS Catalina and macOS Big Sur.

The easiest way would be to use Apple's Notes. Apart from handwriting support, the app has annotation and inline scanning capabilities. With iCloud support available, you can easily access your digital notes on a Mac.

If you need to convert math handwriting to digital LaTeX, MathML, or an image, MathKey is there to help. The app is powered by MyScript Interactive Ink technology and easily transforms plain text into math formulas.

Your macOS is powerful. As a matter of fact, it offers a few free solutions for reading images and PDFs. For advanced functionality like reading Receipts or automatically converting image to text, you still need a bit more. But no worries, there are shortcuts too — every OCR and PDF scanning app mentioned in this article is available for a free 7-day trial with Setapp. You can now stop typing and convert that text in seconds, saving hours.

Apps To Add Text To Photos Mac Backup

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