Almost everyone who uses Google today knows how to, and has done a word, sentence, or paragraph search at some point.
And this is done the usual way of either using the google search bar in the middle of the Google front page.
Or by entering a specific URL in the URL field of the browser
But have you ever wanted to search Google with an image and not know how or whether it was even possible?
Well, this article walks you through how you can make a search with an image in Google step by step by either using a mobile phone or a computer.
Note: Using a mobile phone will give you the most relevant results because it uses the Google lens’ image recognition technology. Never the less, you can try both methods.
How to search Google with an image on mobile
Searching with an image in Google on mobile requires you have the latest update of the Google Photos app installed.
The Google Photos app uses the Google lens’ image recognition technology that uses visual analysis based on a neural network.
The result of this analysis is a series of information related to the image analyzed.
For Android users, you can get it here. For iOS users, you can get it here
If you have Google Photos installed then you all set. Just follow these steps to do an image search on Google:
- Open Google Photos, then open the image you want to use as your search query. I used pug that I got from Pixabay
- Tap on the image to display the image options available. Among these options is the Google lens icon. Click on this icon as shown in the image below.
- The app will do an analysis of the image and then show results in a bottom dialog. You can slide up the results dialog to fill the whole screen.
You could need more specific results about an image for instance results about restaurants.
In that case, you can narrow down your search by clicking on the lens icon at the top left corner of the results dialog. Here you’ll be able to select a category of the results you would want.
You can also do a search on a specific area of the image selected. To get on with this, click on the crop icon at the top right corner of the results dialog.
How to search Google with an image using desktop
- First, open up the Google home page using your browser by typing google.com in the browser URL bar. Or click here to visit the page directly. The page you should see should look something like;
- Next, look for Images at the top right corner of your current Google home page. When you hover over the word “Images”, it will be underlined to show you that is it clickable.
Click on the Images label and your page will be reloaded to show a new page with a search bar that looks something like;
- Look for the camera icon on the right-hand side of the search bar. When you hover over it, it will show the sentence “Search by image”. Click on this icon.
A window will pop up. With this, you can search for an image that is already hosted online or you can upload an image from your computer.
- To upload an image, click on the righthand button labeled Upload an image.
- Under the Upload an image tab, click on Choose file at the bottom left of the window.
This will open the Windows file explorer for you to select the image intended for the search.
- Navigate to the image location, select it, and then click the Open button at the bottom right of the Windows Explorer window.
When the upload is done, Google will then make a search using your uploaded image and your results will be shown
You can repeat the above steps for any images of your choice and if google has results, they will be provided on your screen by Google.