Google Photos became a bit more intelligent this week by introducing the ability to search for photos by the text they contain. It’s also possible to then copy and paste that text if you so desire.

As 9To5Google reports(Opens in a new window), Google didn’t make a big deal of the new feature, instead just confirming its existence in a Google Photos tweet responding to a user who’d noticed it was now possible to search by text.

You spotted it! Starting this month, we’re rolling out the ability to search your photos by the text in them.

Once you find the photo you’re looking for, click the Lens button to easily copy and paste text. Take that, impossible wifi passwords ??

— Google Photos (@googlephotos) August 22, 2019(Opens in a new window)

The ability to detect text in a photo is all thanks to Google Lens (and its optical character recognition), which started life as image recognition technology reliant on a neural network. Google first launched it as a standalone app in 2017 before integrating it with Android’s camera app and opening up its object recognition abilities to millions of people. iOS and web users of Google Photos will be happy to hear search by text also works for them.

Being able to search by text makes both the camera on your phone and Google Photos more useful. How many times have you sat there trying to enter an obscure Wi-Fi password only to get it wrong and need to start again? Now you don’t have to, just take a photo of it, copy the text in Photos, and paste it into the required password field.

Taking quick shots of documents or notes on a noticeboard or in a lecture, for example, should also result in all the text they contain being easy to search for and later copy-paste into an editable form. It won’t be long before we start wondering how we ever functioned without it!

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