Google Lens, Part 3

For the last couple of weeks, we have looked at Google Lens. Lens is a free app that does many things. To catch up on the first ones I wrote about, visit Part 1 or Part 2 as you feel led.

Today I will start with one Lens feature that is not quite perfect. However, when it works, it is a tremendous time saver. If someone gives you a business card, which you may want to add their contact information in Google Contacts. Normally, you would go to your phone or computer and transfer their contact information by typing it in. With Lens, all you need to do is open Lens and point your phone’s camera at the business card. Next, tap on the person’s name. Lens should recognize it as contact information and ask you if you want to add them to your contacts. If so, it will pre-fill most all the information into your Google Contacts. At the beginning of this paragraph, I inferred it may not always work. The reason is that with fancy business cards today, names sideways, flashy colors, designs, dark backgrounds, etc. it sometimes does not recognize them as a card, but then you can copy and paste it in your phone or try the next trick.

After the step above, or any time you copy text, in any amount on Lens, you may want to get that text to your computer. You could paste it into your phone’s email and send it to yourself. But what if you could send it directly to your computer’s clipboard (yes, even Macs, Chromebooks and, for you real geeks; Linux) to use it on your computer? You can and it is easy after you try it for the first time.

For this to work, you need to have your Google Chrome browser opened on your computer. You must also be logged into the same Google account you are using for Lens on your phone. Take a copy of the text with Lens, tap the Text button and then underneath it, look for, “Copy to Computer.” When clicked it will show your computer’s name that has you logged into Chrome. Tap that computer name and it will copy the text from your Lens account to your computer’s clipboard. Then just paste it the way you normally would paste any copied text. It will “magically” appear pasted into your computer. If you only want a word, phrase, paragraph or page to paste, just select that in Lens before you send it and it will be the only part copied. To me, that is amazing and quite a time saver. I hope this pays off for you too.

If you are the owner of a Pixel phone, you are in luck. Lens is built right into the camera app for you. You can open the camera, hold your finger on the viewfinder, and Lens will automatically start and identify what you are looking at…if the element is in Len’s huge database of items.

OK, I am now finished with Google Lens; however, I only covered the basics. It has other features that I will let you search for. Next week I will get on to other questions I have been asked by my readers.