Google Photos To Bring New ‘Chip’ Toolbar

When you scan an image into Google Lens, you’re used to getting a special toolbar for text-heavy images. This helps you interact with the text quickly and effectively. Now, according to 9To5Google, this feature will be coming to the Google Photos app.

This is a really useful tool to have because a lot of the time, people are unaware of the myriad of features that Google Lens has. There are a handful of helpful tools that people can use to ascertain text present in their surroundings, but people opt to capture a photo with their default camera app rather than Lens.

Google Photos is testing out the Chip toolbar

There is good news, however. Google has a solution to, hopefully, have more users interact with the tools in Google Lens. The company is adding the Chip toolbar straight into Google Photos. If you use Google Lens, you’re probably used to seeing the bar of floating buttons on the bottom of the screen. These have options like Copy Text, Translate, Listen, etc, and they let you directly interact with the text in the image.

You could use some Len features in Google Photos, but the Chip toolbar just adds a lot more integration and functionality. It gives you a way to quickly access those tools straight from the Photos app.

This is for images that are mostly text

The Chip toolbar has options that are mostly for text, so Google Photos will only activate the toolbar if it detects that the image is mostly text. If you take a picture of a sign or a small item with some text on it, then you most likely won’t get the toolbar.

However, screenshots of menus or documents will bring up the toolbar. That’s not to say that the feature won’t work on the former examples. You’ll need to manually import those pictures into the Google Lens app and go from there.

There’s no telling when this feature will be available for the general public. Right now, the company is testing it out on a limited selection of people. If this feature does launch, it will be really easy to go back to your old photos and interact with the text on them.