Did you know you can copy text from photos and screenshots in your iPhone camera roll?!

Today’s tip is iPhone-focused, as most of us use iPhones all day long 😆

I only recently discovered that if you take a photo or video that contains text, you can open the photo on your iPhone camera roll or from within the ServiceM8 app and copy the text.

Here’s how:

• Open the Photos app and select a photo or video
• …or open a photo in the ServiceM8 app (this also works with job diary photos)
• Touch and hold a word and move the grab points to adjust the selection. If the text is in a video, pause the video first.
• Tap Copy. To select all of the text in the photo, tap Select All.
• Open up the notes app (or Drafts, I love the Drafts app) and tap, then select Paste

For more information, check out the apple article here.

I used this recently to get ChatGPT to assess the writing style of a magazine article, to help me try to understand different writing styles and improve my own writing.

I took a photo of the article, used this tip to copy the text and then popped the text into ChatGPT with a prompt.

Other ideas for how to use this feature

• Capture appliance information from a photo of that appliance
• Capture text from books or magazines to summarise it, or study the writing style
• Grab an email address or a phone number from a business card or leaflet