Google is bringing Optical Character Recognition to Google Photos. You may have noticed it already, but if not, then try it now. Go to Photos and search for certain text that may have been in a picture you took a while back. Yes, Google Photos will scan your images and see the text in the pictures, and when you search for that text, it will show you all pictures with the said text.

The new feature will complement Google Photos’ already cool tagging features that auto organise pictures based on the people’s faces, places the pics were taken, pets, flowers etc.

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

The coolest thing about this feature is this: once you find the picture with the text you searched for, you can use Google Lens to easily copy and paste that text. Google in a tweet is saying once major use case for this will be in places where WiFi passwords are impossible.

Let’s try an example with my Google Photos. I have searched for the word Deezer to see if there’s any pics of mine with things written Deezer.

Here’s my results:

It has recognised all pictures with word **Deezer**. Including screenshots from the app.

After clicking on the first picture, as it has the text I want, I can then tap on Lens button, and immediately, Lens suggests the Deezer.com link from the photo:

I can directly visit the link. This works so well with emails, links, phone numbers etc.

I can also directly copy all the text from the picture (from the TV) and paste it anywhere else I want. Easy.

I’m selecting the text on the TV directly

This will be very useful with text from clothes, from screenshots, from buildings etc. You will be able to just take a picture of something and later on extract the text from it.

Think about physical receipts e.g. from shops, supermarkets etc. Instead of worrying about how to file them, just take pictures and later on you can copy from the pics any information you may want to extract. Remember Google Photos offers you free backup for life. So all your pics can stay there forever and ever.