Google Photos now Allows Users to Search for Text in Photos

There’s only one reason that phone’s continue to come out with newer, better cameras and more storage than ever before. Remember when the most storage a phone came with was less than 100gb? That age may be long over, but that still doesn’t mean that you have enough room on your phone for everything you need (photos, videos, music, games, books, etc.). A quick search of an app store will show you that you’re not the only one wanting a place to store your pictures, off your phone, for free.

Google Photos has been around for a while now and is the home for billions of images, neatly organized in chronological order. Unfortunately, some of us can’t remember what day it was that we were sitting at the park eating Dominoes and don’t feel like scrolling through days, weeks, even years to find a specific image.  Luckily, over the years Google Photos has released various object recognition features using their Google Lens, a feature that allows users to search their pictures for specific things, making their app less of a photo dump and more of a categorized file system.

Now the tech giant has rolled out it’s the newest feature for Google Lens. It can now search through your images for a text found in them. It doesn’t stop there either, once it finds the photos with the text you’re looking for, you can click the Lens button and copy and paste the text from it. In the app itself, you can also translate the text, making it useful for more than just storing photos. ^[1]

This text detection feature works on both screenshots and ordinary pictures- like a picture of a book or a sign.

You spotted it! Starting this month, we’re rolling out the ability to search your photos by the text in them.

Once you find the photo you’re looking for, click the Lens button to easily copy and paste text. Take that, impossible wifi passwords 😏

— Google Photos (@googlephotos) August 22, 2019