Previously, we were able to quickly search for text in your photos for specific events, people, pets, locations, etc. through Google Photos’ AI technology.
Now, Google has launched a more cool feature – allowing you to search directly for text in your photos.
When we open Google Photos, open the search box and search for the text we want to find, the album will show an image with relevant text.
How to search for text in your photos in Google Photos
Moreover, when we select the image, click the “Lens” button, you can also copy the selected text, and then paste it into the note, the document.
Here, the main use of optical character recognition (OCR) technology in Google Lens, which can accurately extract text from a large number of images through the built-in filter.
This new feature is good at finding text in screenshots and other clearly aligned words, but it also has the advantage that when the fonts in the photo are skewed, distorted, and non-standardized, they are also recognized.
As we become more and more inclined to record life with photos or screenshots, this feature is very useful for us to find the information we need from the image at any time.
For example, search for Wi-Fi passwords taken in the store, posters of movies you want to watch on the roadside, interesting passages taken in books, important content in WeChat screenshots, and more.
In the beginning, this feature was discovered by users @can and @hunterwalk on Twitter, and Google Photos itself confirmed this feature on Twitter.
This feature is available for Android and iOS apps as well as web clients.
According to 9to5Google, this feature is now available on some Android devices, but it hasn’t entered the iOS device yet, but you can also try to search for text in photos using Google Photos on the web.
The new feature introduced this time means that Google Photos will apply OCR technology to all images in the user’s photo album and store metadata about the text contained in the photo in some way, but there is no more with it yet.
OCR technology is the cornerstone of more powerful AI technology.
In fact, as early as Google’s 2017 I/O Developer Conference, Google announced the relevant features, CEO Sundar Pichai said that through the built-in AI Google lens can directly understand the information in the photo.
For example, when you point your phone at a picture with a Wi-Fi password on the wall, the camera automatically recognizes, reads, and connects your phone to Wi-Fi.
Later, Google Lens also added a variety of new features related to OCR technology, such as shooting products to search for product information, shooting business cards to add contact information to the address book, pointing the camera at the musician’s poster, the phone can play related Music videos and more.
Google says its AI camera tools now recognize more than one billion items.
The function of “search for text in your photos” introduced by Google Photos seems to be also to make its own AI technology more applicable, so as to spread it to users on a larger scale.