The Google Lens tool is great for quickly getting relevant photo information. Now it’s getting a little easier to use if you’re a Google Photos devotee. Our readers have identified some 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 is difficult to determine when these features were released, but it appears that it has been in recent weeks.
If Google Lens can find obvious text in your photo, it will highlight it in blue, as before. If you touch the selected text, you can translate it, copy it to another application, speak it out loud or even transfer it to your PC connected to Google. All of them were previously available in the dedicated Google Lens app, but the new interface settings show these options more readily in icons at the bottom of the screen, on the right under Photos.
This expansion of Lens tools to other aspects of Google’s software empire has been going on for some time. Google has been injecting bits of lens into the official Camera and Search apps for some time, and even hiding Easter eggs in the packaging of its own product.
Sources tell us that this new interface for recognized text in the Google Photos library is quite new, although exact dates or version numbers are not available to us. The enhanced discovery of Lens functions within Photos appears to be available to all or most users, at least in the United States, at the time of writing. To see it, make sure to use Photos and have Lens installed.
