If you love Google’s Circle to Search on Android, you’ll enjoy using Snipping Lens, a free Windows app that turns the Snipping Tool into a visual search engine. It uses Google Lens to quickly analyze screenshots, extract text, translate languages, or identify objects, all through your default Windows browser.
Snipping Lens: Brings Google’s Circle to Search in Windows
For those familiar with Android’s Circle to Search, it’s a Google-Samsung jointly developed feature that, when turned on, reverse searches images online. Snipping Lens is a similar free open-source app in GitHub, but for Windows 11 and 10 (and Linux).
You can install the app from its GitHub Release page. Windows users should choose an asset file called “SnippingLens.exe”. You will get a SmartScreen warning as it’s a non-Windows open source app. Proceed to complete the installation.
The way Snipping Lens works is very simple. Open the Snipping Tool as you normally do – with keyboard shortcut Win + Shift + S, or activate it from the System Tray.
Capture the screenshot as usual, except this time it isn’t saved to your Windows desktop alone. The Snipping Lens app runs in the background, uploading the screenshot to Litterbox, a server that auto-deletes images after one hour. Then, a Google Lens window opens in your default browser, such as Google Chrome, providing multiple insights, as listed below.
Instant Visual Search With Google Lens
After capturing a screenshot, a Google Lens tab opens in your browser, highlighting the image. You can drag the boundaries around a specific area for further analysis using the circles at bottom right. Once you adjust the selection, instant results appear below it.
The Windows Snipping Tool offers visual search with Bing, but its interface feels clunky, and the images do not auto-upload since it requires an additional step. No one likes to upload their screenshots manually. This is what puts off most users from using Snipping Tool’s advanced functions.
Moreover, with Bing Search, the search results appear on the right, which seems unnatural for browsing image search results. With Snipping Lens using Google Lens, results display below the screenshot or the selected area, feeling more intuitive.
Also read: while Google search continues to dominate, Bing search has many advantages that users may want to check.
Identify and Describe Your Screenshots
With Snipping Lens integrated into the Snipping Tool, Google Lens’s text prompt helps you identify objects. You can focus on a specific part of a screenshot to pinpoint exactly what it is. Paired with Google’s AI Overviews, this feature delivers detailed results without leaving the webpage.
With multiple browser tabs open, I find many uses for this. For example, you can decode complex code or analyze a circuit diagram. All this information is now just a screenshot away.
Related: for some users, Bing Copilot search works better than Google’s AI Overviews.
Get OCR Capabilities Directly in Snipping Tool
The Snipping Tool’s Text Actions feature identifies text from clear sources but struggles to extract OCR text from images, especially for scanned documents. With Snipping Lens, I can easily extract text from image files, cursive handwriting, scanned documents, and PDFs whenever I want.
Also read: you can use Google Drive to convert images to text.
Multilingual Translations in Screenshots
The circle to search’s translation feature in Windows may seem simple at first, but it shines when you encounter webpages or documents in unfamiliar languages. For the first time ever, such a useful feature is being introduced into a screenshot utility app in Windows.
All you have to do is take a screenshot and use the Translate option to view results instantly, without leaving the webpage tab.
Also read: check out some of the best multilingual translation tools online.
Identifying Products in eCommerce
If you use the circle to search feature in Windows on a website like Amazon, you no longer need to copy-paste product info. It’s much faster to zoom in on an interesting section and instantly get Google search results showing what it does and where it’s available. Depending on how your Snipping Tool is set up in Windows, you can either hit the Print Screen key or simply snip the desired portion to get what you need.
Did you know that you can also record your screen as a GIF with Snipping Tool in Windows 11?
