Google Lens may soon be built into the Chromebook Gallery app

As an extension of the ChromeOS Files app, you may not think too much about the Media Gallery on your Chromebook. After all, I know I don’t take that many photos from my Chromebook that need to be referenced, so unlike something like Google Photos or the Samsung Gallery app on my phone, I simply don’t open the Chromebook Gallery app until I double-click a photo I need to crop or resize.

But that could be changing for me as a new, very interesting feature is being tested right now in the Chromium Repositories for this useful, if a little hidden, ChromeOS app. As you can see in the following code change that was submitted just about a week ago, early work is being done to bring Google Lens to the ChromeOS Gallery app.

With this being an early bit of work, I don’t expect to see this feature rolled out for a while. However, if it does arrive, there are lots of ways I could see this being helpful. Google Lens is a powerful tool that can help you find all sorts of info about anything you have a picture of.

One clear use case would be snagging a screenshot of a thing you want to know more about, opening it in the Gallery app, and running a Lens search against it to learn more. Or maybe you have a random thing you possess, but don’t know where to find more of them to buy. Hold it up in front of your Chromebook camera, snap a pic, and let Lens find out more for you.

While you can basically do this sort of thing in Google Search right now, it’s not integrated enough (and is a tad bit clunky) for me to think about using it very often. But if I could search right from the image viewer (the Gallery app) after snapping a pic, I could see myself using something like this on a very regular basis. I’d imagine many of you feel the same, and I can’t wait to see this in action with an update down the road just a bit.