The Accidental Selection
iOS includes a highly advanced optical character recognition (OCR) feature called “Live Text.” If you open a photograph of a restaurant menu or a street sign, your iPhone automatically scans the image, identifies the text, and allows you to tap and highlight it exactly as if it were a standard Word document. While this is incredibly impressive technology, it frequently interferes with normal photo viewing. If you are simply trying to double-tap to zoom in on a photo, or swipe your finger to pan across an image, the iPhone often mistakes your touch for an attempt to highlight text, freezing your gesture and bringing up a copy/paste menu instead. You must turn this feature off to restore standard touch controls.
How to Turn Off Live Text
You can completely disable the OCR scanning engine via the general settings.
- Open the Settings app on your iPhone.
- Scroll down the main list and tap on General.
- Tap on Language & Region.
- Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page.
- Look for the master toggle switch labeled Live Text.
- Toggle this switch to the Off position (the green background will disappear).
Viewing Photos Normally
The change is absolute and instantaneous. You can now open the Photos app and aggressively swipe, pinch, and tap on images containing massive amounts of text. The iPhone will treat the image strictly as a dumb grid of pixels, completely ignoring the letters. You will regain total, uninterrupted control over your standard photo navigation gestures.