How to Search Anything on Your Android Screen With Google Lens

The ways that already exist

• Circle to Search (newer Pixel and Samsung phones): hold the navigation bar or home button, circle the thing, get results. Excellent, but limited to specific models.
• Screenshot, then Lens: take a screenshot, open Google Photos, tap Lens. Works everywhere, takes several taps, and leaves a screenshot in your gallery to delete later.
• Share to Lens: in apps that allow sharing an image, share it to the Google app. Not possible for video frames or protected images.

Send your screen to Lens with one press

Long Press Menu adds a Search Image action to the menu that opens when you hold the power button. Android passes the menu a screenshot of whatever is on screen, and the app hands it to Google Lens, the Google app, or any app you choose from the share sheet. It works on any Android phone that supports assistant apps, including ones without Circle to Search.

1. Make Long Press Menu your assistant app.
2. In Android's assistant settings, turn on Use screenshot.
3. With the item on screen, hold the power button and tap Search Image.
4. Pick Lens (or another app) once; results open immediately.

Nothing is captured until you tap the button. The screenshot is written to the app's private cache so that Lens can read it, and it is replaced by your next search.

What it is good for

• Shopping: find where to buy something from a video or a story.
• Translation: Lens translates text in a frame of a foreign-language video.
• Plants, animals, landmarks, artwork and the font you keep seeing.
• Homework: solve a problem that is on screen in a PDF reader.

Privacy, briefly

The menu itself never uploads anything. When you tap Search Image, the screenshot goes to the app you chose, and from there Google's own privacy policy applies, exactly as if you had shared a screenshot yourself. Secure screens such as banking apps are never captured, because Android blocks that.