Starting with macOS Monterey, Apple introduced a feature called “Live Text.” This machine-learning algorithm constantly scans every single image displayed on your screen (in Safari, Photos, Preview, and even Quick Look). If it detects letters or numbers inside an image, it turns your standard mouse pointer into an I-beam text selector, allowing you to highlight, copy, and paste text directly out of a JPEG or PNG file.
While this is incredibly useful for extracting phone numbers from photos of business cards, it can be deeply frustrating for photographers and designers. If you are trying to click and drag an image to move it, or trying to use the magnifying glass tool in Preview, macOS will frequently misinterpret your click as an attempt to highlight the text embedded in the photo. This causes the image to lock in place while the text highlights in blue. If you prefer your images to behave like static images and want to reclaim your ability to easily click and drag them, you must completely disable the Live Text engine.
Disabling Live Text via Language & Region Settings
Because Live Text relies on the operating system’s optical character recognition (OCR) dictionaries, Apple buried the off switch inside the Language & Region menu.
- Click the Apple Logo in the top-left corner of your Mac’s screen and select System Settings….
- Scroll down the left-hand navigation sidebar and click on General.
- In the main panel, click on Language & Region.
- Scroll to the absolute bottom of the Language & Region page.
- Look for the toggle switch labelled Live Text (usually located directly below the “Translation” settings).
- Click the toggle switch to turn it Off.
The change takes effect immediately across the entire operating system. The background machine-learning daemon will stop scanning images for words. You can now open a photograph containing text in Safari or Preview, and your mouse cursor will remain a standard pointer, allowing you to click, drag, and interact with the image file normally without accidentally highlighting words.