Google Photos Now Lets You Search For Text In Photos

Have you ever taken a photo and it contains text and you wanted to search for that text within it? We’re not sure how many of you would have need for such a feature, but the good news is that if you use Google Photos, Google has announced that the service will be gaining a new Lens feature that will allow users to search for text within their photos.

This means that in the event you take a photo of a printed document or a page from a book, you’ll actually be able to search for that text and even copy and paste it so that if you want, you can digitize it for convenience and easier reading. This relies on optical character recognition technology, which isn’t actually a new technology, but it’s nice to know that it has finally arrived for Google Photos.

At the moment, the feature seems to have rolled out for Android devices and it doesn’t seem to be live for iOS yet. However, Google typically keeps its apps on par with each other in terms of features across both platforms, so we imagine that Google will eventually get around to updating its iOS app with the same feature.

That being said, we imagine that the accuracy of the OCR will also depend on the quality and clarity of the image. If your photo is blurry and warped, then you might not have as much luck compared to a nice and crisp shot, so your mileage may vary.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Google, google photos