Chrome on your iPhone can search using pictures and words at the same time

November 12, 2024

By

The Verge

Illustration: The Verge

The iOS version of Google’s Chrome browser is getting upgraded with several features from the Android iteration, including simultaneous Google Lens image and text search. Chrome for iOS could already use Google Lens to search for a picture on your iPhone or one taken from the camera, but now you can add words along with it to narrow your search in one go.

For instance, you can upload a picture of a t-shirt design you like into Lens and type the name of a color that you prefer into search, and it will try to find the shirt you want. This update comes as Apple launched its own Visual Intelligence search, which only works on iPhone 16 and 16 Pro.

gif of a google lens search of a snowboard on iOS chrome on an iPhone, and then the user enters “purple” into the text box and it finds more snowboards with the color. — *Search a picture of a snowboard design you like, but see if it comes in purple.*

The new iOS Chrome also lets you save images and files (such as PDFs) from the web directly to Google Photos and Google Drive, allowing you to access them elsewhere quickly and not take up your iPhone’s local storage. This could be helpful for those who have already filled up Apple’s paltry 5GB of free iCloud storage or who would prefer to use Google Drive.

GIF iOS chrome app on iPhone on a webpage showing a “cozy dinner party guide” and the user downloads the PDF but taps the save button and saves the file under google drive instead of the apple local files storage. — *You can save this PDF straight to Google Drive.*

Additionally, iOS Chrome is getting Shopping Insights, which can notify you of a “Good Deal Now” in the address bar on products you’re searching for and get access to a price tracker. You’ll have to sync your browsing history with Google and turn on “Make searches & browsing better,” which sends Google URLs of pages you visit.

price tracker view in chrome — *The “Good deal now” pop-up.*

gif of iOS chrome on an iPhone, the user taps and address to “the lumos reverie” and it pops up a Google Map from the bottom. — *Tap on an address in websites to get the “mini-map.”*

There’s also now a mini-map viewer in Chrome that lets you tap an address on a website and take a peek at where it is on a Google Map — without having to open Google Maps in another tab or switch to the Google Maps app. According to Google, more features will be added to iOS Chrome in the coming months.