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Find words in images in Google Photos
As part of the celebrations for its 10th birthday, Google Photos has updated its search tool to help you find images containing specific words. Powered by its AI chatbot Gemini, this builds on a feature introduced last year, which lets you search for photos by describing their subject – for example, ‘me on the beach’. The new option focuses solely on the text within images, so is useful for searching screenshots and photos of documents, tickets, receipts, menus, forms of identification and even magazine covers. To use it, Google says to put your search term in quotation marks, for example “boarding pass” or “account” (see www. snipca.com/55104).
You actually don’t need to do this, because when you tap the Search tab and type a word or two, you should see a ‘Text matches’ suggestion with your query already in quotes ( 1 in our screenshot below left). Tap this to search your Google Photos library for images containing that term – the tool also looks within file names and captions.
If you don’t put the search term in quotes, Google Photos will find both image and text matches, which will take longer to sift through. You can sort the results by ‘Most recent’ or ‘Best match’ 2 . Google Photos also now lets you share albums using a QR code. Tap the Share button in an album and choose ‘Show QR code’. This will generate a code other people can scan to view and add photos to the album.