Google Photos ‘chips’ for quickly interacting with image text now appearing widely

It lets you get more done with fewer taps

Google Photos and Google Lens are a pair of very powerful companions for your phone’s camera. For a while, the Photos app has offered integration with Lens to handle text inside both images you snap yourself, as well as screenshots — it may not be 100% accurate, but it works impressively well. In an attempt to make these features more accessible to users, last month Google started testing new “chip” shortcuts when detecting there’s text in an image. The experience is now rolling out widely and should be available on most devices.

We’ve already seen Photos demonstrate the ability to recognize the presence of text and direct users towards interacting with it in Lens. If you’ve received the update, though, you’ll now find a chip with the option to search inside the screenshot for captures with lots of text, as spotted by 9to5Google. However, additional chips with options like “Copy text,” “Listen,” “Crop,” and “Markup” don’t seem to be widely available just yet. These are all already existing options within the app — the addition of these new shortcuts seems intended to make them all that much more visible and easier to access.

There’s also a shortcut to search using Google Lens, which is kind of pointless given you already have a “Lens” button in the bottom bar. We’re trying not too hung up on that, though, since this is still clearly a feature under active testing — so far, we have the option to search within screenshots, but not the others. For those it does appear on, the chips seem to turn up far more frequently in actual screenshots than they do for photos of text.

If you want to see the available shortcut, make sure you have the latest version of Photos from either Google Play or APKMirror. As for the other chips, we can’t promise you that you’ll get them right now (since they’ve yet to roll out widely for everyone), but it doesn’t hurt to try.

Thanks: Eduardo

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