Google Photos finally lets PC users copy text from an image
One of the handiest Google Photos features just landed on the desktop—via your browser—where it could be even more valuable.
The mobile version of Photos supports a technology called Google Lens. In 2018, Lens introduced optical character recognition (OCR) technology that can automatically copy any text found in an image, allowing you to paste it elsewhere for easy saving ( go.pcworld.com/in18). As 9to5google ( go.pcworld.com/at95) spotted over the weekend, that Lens OCR feature is now rolling out to desktop browsers, and that rocks.
Enabling OCR in Google Photos makes it easy-peasy to take a picture of a document, book, or anything else on your phone, open it in your browser, and quickly copy its contents
into an Office file ( go.pcworld.com/ofle). It’s already active on my account and it works scarily well on the handful of pictures I tried it with (as you might expect, since Google invests heavily in artificial intelligence speech recognition).
You’ll know you have access to the feature if you open a picture with words in it via the Google Photos website ( go.pcworld. com/gph0) and a Copy Text From Image prompt appears at the top of the page. Select it to summon the words in a separate pane for hassle-free copy and pasting. The service even lets you choose portions of text if you don’t want to snag every word.