Google reverse image search

What Google Lens does

Google Lens analyses the picture you give it and returns several kinds of results at once: visually similar images, pages that contain the same or a very similar picture, shopping results for products it recognises, and information about landmarks, plants, animals and text in the image. Because it looks at what is inside a picture, you can search with a photo of a chair, a building or a menu even if nobody ever wrote a description of it.

Older guides talk about a separate Search by image feature. That feature has largely been folded into Lens, so the steps and screens you see today may look different from screenshots on older websites.

What Lens is good at

Lens tends to work best when you want to understand or buy something you can see:

• Identifying everyday objects, plants, animals and landmarks.
• Finding shops that sell a similar item, such as furniture, clothing or gadgets.
• Reading text in a photo, copying it or translating it.
• Finding pages that use a popular or widely shared image.
• Matching a product photo to the brand or model it shows.

Where Lens falls short

Lens is built around visual similarity and shopping, so the original source of an image can be buried under lookalikes and product listings. If your goal is to trace a picture back to its first appearance, compare Lens with TinEye, which focuses on exact and edited copies, and with Bing and Yandex.

Like every engine, Lens can only match what it has indexed. Pictures from private accounts, brand new images and heavily cropped or filtered versions often return weak results.

Using Google Lens from this site

The Google Lens card opens Lens with a temporary link to your picture, so you do not have to upload it again.

1. Upload your image on the Upload tab, or paste an image link on the Image URL tab.
2. Press Search All 4 Engines.
3. Open the Google Lens card.
4. If Google shows a consent page or a prompt, follow it. Those screens come from Google, not from this site.

Using Lens in your browser and on your phone

In Chrome on a computer you can usually right-click an image on a web page and choose the option to search it with Google Lens. On Android, pressing and holding an image often shows a similar option, and on iPhone the Google app and Chrome offer comparable choices. The exact menu names change between versions, so look for Lens or search-by-image in the menu.

Those shortcuts are quick for images you find while browsing. For a file saved on your device, or when you want to compare several engines, uploading it here is faster.

Tips for better Lens results

• Crop to the object you care about. A busy background distracts the matching.
• Try both the whole picture and a tight crop of the most distinctive part.
• Add words to the search when Lens offers a text box. A brand, colour or place name often sharpens the results.
• Check the pages behind the results, not only the thumbnails.
• Compare with at least one other engine before deciding that an image has no matches.

Extra context from Google

Google also offers an About this image feature for some results. When it is available, it can show how other sites describe a picture and when it first appeared in Google's index. It is not available for every image or in every region, so treat it as a helpful extra rather than a guarantee.