How to Use Google Lens in Chrome to Search Any Image

What does Google Lens actually do inside Chrome?

Google Lens is a visual search tool built into Chrome that identifies what's in an image, objects, text, products, plants, landmarks, and returns matching results, shopping links or translations. On desktop it lives in two places: the right-click context menu on any image, and a camera-shaped icon inside the address bar for searching part of the current page.

Availability differs by platform, which matters if you use one device and switch to another.

• Desktop Chrome (Windows, Mac, ChromeOS) — right-click any image for Search image with Google Lens, plus an address-bar icon for region search on supported pages.
• Android Chrome — Lens is integrated the same way, sometimes with an added long-press option depending on your Chrome version.
• iPhone and iPad Chrome — Lens support is more limited inside Chrome itself; the fuller Lens experience usually lives in the separate Google app or Google Search app instead.

For deeper research workflows beyond a single image search, see the research category for related tools.

How do you search an image with Google Lens using right-click?

This is the fastest path and works for any image rendered as a normal image element on the page, which covers most photos, product shots and article images.

1. Right-click directly on the image you want to search.
2. Choose Search image with Google Lens from the context menu.
3. A side panel opens on the right edge of the window showing visual matches, related searches or shopping links.
4. Click any result to open it in a new tab, or use the search box at the top of the panel to refine with added text.

This won't work on every image. Photos rendered as a CSS background rather than an actual image element, images inside a cross-origin iframe, or pages that block right-clicking with a script won't offer the Lens option at all.

How do you use the Lens icon in the address bar for part of a page?

The camera icon that sometimes appears at the right edge of the address bar lets you search a region of whatever's currently on screen, not just a single image file, useful for a diagram spread across multiple elements, or a product shown inside a canvas-based layout that right-click can't target directly.

Click the icon, then drag a selection box over the area you want identified: a shoe in a lifestyle photo, a chart in an article, a paragraph of text in another language. Lens processes just that selection rather than the whole page, which gives more precise shopping and text-translation results than searching a full screenshot would.

How is Google Lens different from a classic reverse image search?

Lens replaced Chrome's older, simpler reverse-search menu option with a richer panel that adds shopping matches, text extraction and translation on top of plain visual matching, and since results funnel through Google's index, Lens pairs naturally with anything under works with Google Search in our directory.

Can you use Lens to shop from a photo or screenshot?

Yes — Lens surfaces visually similar products alongside pricing and store links when it recognizes something shoppable, one of its most common real-world uses: spotting an item in a photo and finding where to buy it.

If a Lens shopping result lands you on an unfamiliar Shopify storefront, Koala Inspector shows the store's theme, installed apps and bestsellers before you buy, a quick way to gauge whether it's an established shop or a thin dropshipping storefront. If you'd rather save the product image to compare options later instead of buying immediately, Save to Pinterest drops it straight onto a board.

What if you want to save or reuse the image Lens found?

Lens shows you matches but doesn't automatically save anything, so if a result is useful, you need a separate step to keep it.

Can Google Lens translate or copy text out of an image?

Yes. Beyond identifying objects, Lens can select text it detects inside an image and let you copy it, or translate it if it's in another language, useful for a photographed menu, a screenshot of foreign-language text, or a scanned document.

This runs through the same right-click or address-bar flow as an object search; Lens automatically detects when an image is mostly text and switches its panel to a copy-or-translate view instead of a shopping or visual-match view. It's a lighter-weight option for one-off images, though a tool built specifically for ongoing page translation, like Google Translate, still handles full pages better.

Why doesn't Lens show up when you right-click an image?

The most common reason is technical, not a setting you've turned off: the image isn't actually an element Chrome can hand to Lens.

A CSS background image, a photo rendered inside a canvas element (common in some web apps and games), or an image sitting inside an iframe from a different domain can all block the right-click option from appearing. Some sites also disable right-clicking entirely with a script, in which case no context-menu options show up at all, Lens included. If you've switched your default search engine away from Google, the address-bar Lens icon can disappear entirely, since it depends on Google being set as default.

Does using Google Lens send your images to Google?

Yes — searching an image or a page region with Lens sends that image data to Google's servers to run the visual match, the same way typing a query into Google Search sends your query text.

For most photos, products and screenshots this is no different from doing a normal search. For anything sensitive, a photographed ID, a financial document, a private message screenshot, treat a Lens search the same way you'd treat pasting that content into a search box: don't. If you'd rather a sensitive Lens search not linger in your synced history, see how to clear browsing history in Chrome afterward.