Press ⇧⌘2 and drag over any text on your screen — a paused video, a screen share, a scanned PDF. Let go, and it’s on your clipboard.
How it works
The words in a paused video, a screen share, a scanned PDF or a photo — turned into text you can paste, in one quick motion.
Thursday release
Freeze the branch Thursday at noon. QA runs overnight; we ship Friday.
Release notes draft due Wednesday, owners listed in the tracker.
Support replies updated before the announcement goes out.
In any app, on any display. The screen dims and your pointer becomes a crosshair.
A paused video, a shared slide, a scanned page. Only what’s inside the box is read.
Read on your Mac by Apple’s Vision framework. A small Copied bubble shows what it found.
Real, editable text for a note, a reply or a ticket. No screenshot file left behind.
Features
Search everything you’ve captured, read codes and whole PDFs — and, new in this release, paste tables as tables and translate as you capture.
01History
Recent captures wait in a searchable history in the menu bar. Filter by Text, Links or QR Codes, and click any item to copy it again.
02Codes & links
Drag over a QR code or a barcode and what it holds is on your clipboard. Links stay links — paste them anywhere, or open them straight from your history.
03Images & PDFs
Choose Open Image… and pick a photo or a scanned PDF of up to 50 pages: every page is read on your Mac and the text lands in your history. Or read an image that’s already on your clipboard.
04Tables New
Capture a table and paste it into Numbers, Excel or Google Sheets with rows and columns intact — every value in its own cell.
05Translate New
Hold ⌥ as you let go, and the text is translated before it’s copied — on your Mac, with nothing sent anywhere.
Everyday captures
The slide that moved on too fast. The error code forty characters long. The menu you can’t read. Drag over it once, and the text is on your clipboard.
Slides from a paused lecture and passages from scanned readings, straight into your notes.
Error codes, log lines and code from a video tutorial — no squinting, no retyping.
Order numbers and settings from a customer’s screenshot, ready to paste.
Quotes from scanned papers and PDFs that won’t let you select a word.
Reads around 30 languages, in whatever script they’re written in.
Privacy & craft
No account, no uploads, no Dock icon. Unpixel does its work on-device, stays out of your way, and answers to your keyboard.
On-device
Apple’s Vision framework reads the pixels right here. Each capture is processed in memory, then discarded — never saved as an image, never uploaded.
Unpixel goes online for two things only: verifying your license and checking for updates. Privacy policy
0bytes
Native
Liquid Glass, system controls and SF Symbols. It follows Light and Dark, Reduce Motion, Reduce Transparency and VoiceOver.
Keyboard-first
⇧⌘2 starts a capture in any app. Prefer another shortcut? Record your own.
Automation
Wire Unpixel into Raycast, Alfred, Shortcuts or a Terminal script.
unpixel://captureStart a selectionunpixel://clipboardRead the image on the clipboardunpixel://openOpen an image or PDFunpixel://historyShow the history panelunpixel://settingsOpen SettingsSet and forget
Every 1.x update is free.
Whatever your wallpaper, Unpixel’s panels sit on top of it like they were always part of the desktop.
Pricing
No subscription, no account. Every feature and every 1.x update is included.
For one Mac. Yours to keep.
Need more than 3 Macs, or licenses for a team or a classroom? Get in touch. Already bought? Download Unpixel.
FAQ
The short version: it runs on your Mac, you pay once, and you can get a refund for 14 days. Anything else? Email us.
It turns anything on your screen into text you can paste. Press ⇧⌘2, drag a box over the text — in a video, a screen share, a scanned PDF, a photo, a slide or an error dialog — and when you let go, the text is on your clipboard. It also reads QR codes and barcodes, copied images, and image or PDF files.
No. Text recognition runs on your Mac with Apple’s Vision framework. Captured images are processed in memory and never saved or uploaded, and your history is a local file you can clear or switch off.
Unpixel only goes online to verify your license with our payment provider, Dodo Payments (it sends your license key and your Mac’s name and model), and to check for updates. Details are in the Privacy Policy.
Unpixel requires macOS 26 Tahoe or later on a Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or newer). It’s built around macOS 26’s Liquid Glass design and the latest Vision text recognition.
macOS requires it for any app that reads pixels from the screen. Unpixel uses it only at the moment you release a selection, and only for the area you selected — it never records video or captures in the background. The welcome guide walks you through the one-time setup.
About 30, including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Turkish, Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Unpixel detects the language automatically, or you can pin one in Settings → Recognition.
Clean, printed text works best. Accurate mode copes well with small, faded and low-contrast text; neat handwriting often works, messy handwriting is hit and miss. If a capture comes out wrong, zoom in on the source and capture again — more pixels mean better results.
Not on protected video. Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+ and other services that use DRM show up as a black rectangle to every screen-capture tool — macOS enforces this, so Unpixel can’t read text from those frames. YouTube, Vimeo, video calls, lecture recordings and your own video files work fine. Unsure? Take a regular screenshot (⇧⌘4) first: if it comes out black, Unpixel will see black too.
Yes. Unpixel responds to unpixel://capture, unpixel://clipboard, unpixel://open, unpixel://history and unpixel://settings. Use them from Raycast, Alfred, Shortcuts (Open URL) or the Terminal with open unpixel://capture.
This version of Unpixel isn’t notarized by Apple yet, so macOS asks you to confirm the first launch. Open it once, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway. You only do this once per version. The install guide has step-by-step instructions.
No — instead there’s a 14-day money-back guarantee. Buy it, use it for real work for two weeks, and if it isn’t for you, email us for a full refund. No forms, no questions.
It’s a one-time purchase for 1, 2 or 3 Macs. Your license key appears on the confirmation page and arrives by email right away. Open Unpixel, paste the key on the Activate screen (or in Settings → License), and you’re set.
Every 1.x update is free — bug fixes, new macOS support and new features alike. If there’s ever a 2.0 with big new features, it may be a separate purchase. Upgrading is always optional: the version you bought keeps working with your license.
Yes. On the old Mac, open Unpixel’s Settings → License and choose Deactivate This Mac, then activate the same key on the new one. If the old Mac is gone, email us and we’ll free up the slot.
Yes. Each license covers up to 3 Macs, and you can buy as many as you need — every purchase comes with its own key. For more than a handful of Macs, or if you need an invoice in your organization’s name, email us and we’ll set it up.
Search your inbox for the order email from Dodo Payments, or open the customer portal and sign in with the email you used to buy. Still stuck? Email support@getunpixel.app.
If Unpixel isn’t right for you, email us within 14 days of purchase for a full refund. The license key is deactivated when the refund goes through. See the Refund Policy.
Checkout is run by Dodo Payments, our Merchant of Record. They process the payment securely, calculate sales tax or VAT for your country, and email your receipt. We never see your card details.
No account, ever. You need a connection once to activate your license. After that Unpixel works offline: it re-checks the license about once a day when you’re online, and keeps working for up to 30 days without a connection.
Text stuck in a video, a slide or a scan is one shortcut away. Unpixel is $5.99, once — no subscription.
