If you’ve uploaded hundreds or thousands of images and videos on Google Photos, it can sometimes be a pain to search through all of them, unless you know the date and the place where they were taken. Google will now try and make your life easier as you will be able to search for photos that have text in them. Even better, you’ll be able to copy and paste the text onto other places like messaging apps, social media networks, etc.
Using the power of OCR or optical character recognition on Google Photos is probably one of the best tools that they’ve added the past few years. This means that all of your photos that contain text, whether it’s a book cover, a quote you screencapped, a hard-to-remember password you took a photo of, a business card, a phone number you need to call later on, can now be searchable on both the app and web version.
Even better, you’ll be able to highlight the text that you want, copy it, then paste it wherever it needs to be pasted. You can paste that phone number in your dialler directly or paste it onto your Wi-Fi password box, or save that quote you like in your notes app. This feature is powered by Google Lens which has been flexing its image-searching prowess the past few months. Having this “power” on your Google Photos will make life easier, search-wise and copy-pasting wise.
Here’s how it works. Make sure your app is updated to the latest version of course. Open it and type on the search bar any word in a picture that you’re looking for. Tap on the image that you want to copy something from and then tap on the Google Lens button, the square one with a dot on it. It will then highlight all of the text in the photo. Tap on the words that you want and then select the copy text option. Then go ahead and paste it wherever you want.
Google has started rolling out this feature but if you’re not seeing yet, just be patient and wait for it. And of course, make sure your Google Photos app is updated to the latest version.
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
