The Google Lens tool is fantastic for quickly grabbing relevant info from photos. Now it’s getting a little easier to use if you’re a Google Photos devotee. Our readers have spotted a few new tools when you tap the Lens icon while viewing a single item in the official Google Photos app, or when you scroll down to use the more expanded photo info panel. It’s hard to pin down when these features went live, but it appears to be within the last couple of weeks.
If Google Lens can spot obvious text in your photo, it will highlight it in blue, as before. If you tap on the selected text, you can translate it, copy it to another app, speak it aloud, or even transfer it to your Google-connected PC. All of these were previously available in the dedicated Google Lens app, but the new interface tweaks show these options more readily in icons at the bottom of the screen right in Photos.
This broadening of Lens tools into other aspects of Google’s software empire has been going on for a while. Google has been injecting Lens bits into the official Camera and Search apps for some time, and even hiding Easter eggs on its own product packaging.
Sources tell us that this new interface for text recognized in the Google Photos library is fairly new, though exact dates or version numbers aren’t available to us. The enhanced discoverability for Lens functions inside Photos appears to be available to all or most users, at least in the US, at the time of writing. To see it, make sure you’re using Photos and have Lens installed.
