Chrome’s Google Lens sidebar for convenient reverse image searches is now official
Over recent months, Google has been silently reworking how reverse image search works in the desktop version of Chrome, swapping the old system out in favor of Google Lens. A similar maneuver happened in 2019 forthe mobile version of Chrome. While many have been using the new Google Lens sidebar system for months after it silently rolled out, today Google is making Google Lens and its new sidebar-based look in Chrome for desktop official.
If you haven’t followed along with the developments, I don’t blame you, but the change here may actually be for the better and more convenient than the older reverse image search functionality. All you need to do is right-click an image, select “search image with Google Lens,” and a sidebar on the right shows you visual matches for the image straight from the same tab. You can also right-click anywhere on the page, select “search images with Google Lens,” and crop currently rendered visual content on the page into a Google Lens search, whether it’s a standalone image file or not.
Since it’s powered by Google Lens, it also has more functionality than before, with the ability to select and even translate text inside images. You can easily crop to better match specific content — it will also offer to crop automatically to specific cues or objects it recognizes. The only drawback is that the sidebar is small enough that selecting text on widescreen-formatted images can be a little obnoxious. But you can easily pop out the sidebar into its own tab using a button at the top-right corner if you need more space to select text.
If the results for matching images included in the sidebar aren’t enough or you don’t dig the look, you could click “find image source” to open the more traditional reverse image search screen in Google Search, so no functionality has been lost. There’s also a button to open that in a new tab if you don’t want to lose your work or navigate away from the current page.
Google says that this is now widely rolling out to all Chrome users. However, itseemedto be generally availableback in April for customers on Chrome 100, but that may have simply been a very wide-reaching test. Some of you may have been using this tool for weeks now (most of us at Android Police have), but now it’s officially official-er. Google has instructions onhow to get Google Lens-based reverse image search workingif you need them.
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