How to use GOOGLE LENS (How to get it and what it can do)

today we're going to talk about what it does and where you can get it and and then hopefully i'd like to show you some of the ways that i'm finding it creeping into my genealogy life and whether you do family history or not i know we have people just kind of walk watch because they love the tech stuff that's cool we're gonna you can use this for so many different things and in fact i'm gonna show you some of the ways i'm using it that isn't genealogy related as well so do you remember in episode 23 we were talking about google photos so google lens is kind of working in google photos that's what i mean when i say if you watch that episode if you gave google photos a look or a try you've probably already used google lens now remember we showed how you put some photos in google photos you don't have to put all your photos there but if you put some of them or just your family history photos or or whatever you can tap in search and it will give you this list of faces it's going to start grabbing faces that's what google lens is doing it's grabbing faces out of your photographs and so here's a lot of faces from many of the photographs that i have in my collection when i click on my grandmother's face remember it google photos found my grandmother briquette in so many different images and when i first looked at this i thought oh well that's not right but i realize she's in the photograph behind me and so the picture of me with her in the photo behind me google photos google lens found her in that picture it found her in a collage it found her every single one of these images has some portion of my grandmother's face including videos so i've put some of my family history videos into google photos and there she is this one blows me away it's half of her face and it still knew that that was my grandmother and it matched her up so and here she is it was a snapshot of my google photos and my phone had my grandmother's face and it and it saw her so this is a really powerful tool and you know we talk about facial recognition software that's out there that's all being developed there's machine learning that kind of comes into play here and artificial intelligence google lens is part of that and when you think about what we did last week with a newspaper navigator that too was using this kind of artificial intelligence they call it their ai trainer to be able to spot photos and deliver them to you and in fact you know i was thinking about the newspaper navigator that we did last week in episode uh gosh this is 27 so that was 26. remember you could train the newspaper navigator you could tell it i like more of this give me more of that and it starts to train it well google photos is the same thing right here is this the same person it's going to spot images and ask you to train it and i say yes you found a photo of my grandmother well under her 60s and also her high school photograph so we can also train it to say nope that's not the right person so we're already doing the training we're already using machine learning and google lens and that happens here in google photos so where else can we find google lens is it anywhere else if you have an android smartphone you have it built in in many different ways now i myself have an iphone so i'm going to just focus on the ways that everybody can access google lens but if you're an android user do a little google searching on that because you have a lot of different ways that you can use google lens but for all of us no matter what kind of smartphone you have if you have an app store you can go in and download the free google photos app and the free google search app so we're going to focus on those today to show you what they can do and it's pretty jaw dropping i think it is so on mobile let's start with the google photos app because we've already talked about using google photos and if you're using it on your desktop you're going to want to get the free app on your phone so that you can access it and also be able to get some of the images from your phone should you want to into google photos as well and then google lens will be applied to it so here's an example so one of the things that bill and i did this summer was we did a little renovation in the front part part of the house and this section had gotten so overgrown if you follow me on instagram you saw that i was ripping bushes out of the front yard and poured my cat my poor ginger cat she's wandering around going what's happening all my hiding spaces are gone so this is what's left and we've cleared everything out and so we're thinking about kind of some things we might want to put in here for next season but one of the things i did was i moved this three-tier pot from the backyard into the front yard it was hidden away i never even planted anything in it so when i got it i said i said to bill when you're at home depot grab me a whole flat of something you know some kind of flower that you think is pretty so he brought these in and i planted them and i love them they they they're perfect for texas uh they love the heat they open during the day they close in the evening but what if you wanted to know what kind of flower they were because i didn't know there weren't any tags in the little containers google photos can tell us so here's a photo i took with my phone and google photos and when you pull up the photo in google photos you see the google lens icon on every photo tap it look what it did it says oh that's moss rose purslane and that's exactly what it is i asked my neighbor who knows flowers and she said oh yeah that's what it's personally so google photos the photograph was already in google photos so when i opened the app i selected the photo you always see the google lens little icon at the bottom tap it it tells you what it is and if you click through to the search results you're going to find everything you ever wanted to know about the type of flower that you're looking at so if you're a gardener of any type it specifically can identify pretty much any plant that you take a photograph of pretty amazing isn't that so it's going to connect you to information on the web and so this just kind of cracks open the door to well what other ways could we use this kind of technology that would help us when we're doing our family history work so here's another way i started using this when google lens first came out and of course i travel all over the world and i speak at conferences and i'm constantly handing out my business card and what i discovered was people were giving me their business cards too at conferences so i grab them all and i like to put them into uh google photos well google photos plays hand in hand with google photo scan now if you have not used this app put it on your list because google photo scan is another free app and here's the beauty of it so my card can you tell has a little shine and that shine just like if you took a um a photograph of a picture in a frame that glass is gonna give you glare right so if i just took a regular photograph of this i'm gonna get the glare and it's funny because this special little card actually has fake glare on it to make it look like it's an iphone i know so you want to be able to take a photograph of it so that you're not going to get the glare whether it's this or it's a photograph in a frame so google photos is perfect for that i'm going to show you how this works and you can access it once you have that on your phone you can access it through google photos so photo scan is going to take the picture to get a better picture than just your camera would and then we're gonna it's gonna automatically jump over into google photos and give us access to lens have i confused you yet i think i'm confusing me let's see what this looks like so here's the the card okay we're going to go into google photos i want to show you how you get to google photo scan if you don't want to open that app first if you're already in google photos you tap the three lines at the bottom you'll see that there's a photo scan app on your phone and it's so it will be connected tap that it automatically opens photo scan when you take a picture look at the four dots you move your phone and you take one photo in each corner photo scan automatically knits them all together perfectly in one image that generally will eliminate the glare so you can see that there's fake glare actually in the coloring of my card which is not a great example but it works beautifully and it works great with pictures and frames so i'm going to go back into google photos and there's my picture now i have the google lens icon at the bottom of the picture if you tap that with a business card it's like magic this is what happens automatically it has converted everything that was on your business card into actionable buttons can you believe this so now it spots it it says hey you want to call this person just tap this button you can call them add a contact it's going to give you related searches tap it oh it looks like she's got a podcast tap that it's going to take you over to google and give you the podcast in the search results you're literally taking a flat business card with type text and you're turning it into this interactive image in google photos so that you can call people text people add them to your contacts go search for the stuff that's talked about if their web address is on it it's going to take you to their website pretty amazing i use this a lot actually now again let your mind just jump out of the box because this is just one example so if this is one example what other kinds of things are you constantly taking pictures of or trying to rewrite everything down on a pad of paper that has information on it excuse me that you may goodness sip okay you might have other kinds of things now keep in mind i know you're a genealogist so you're thinking about oh i've got these documents okay handwritten stuff isn't probably going to work too well but if it's typed it will work okay so think about stuff whether it's your everyday life or your family history work life what other stuff has information on it that can be done in the same way anything that has a phone number on it is going to work for this it's pretty cool are you having fun yet i'm having fun i'm having fun telling you about it because i just think this stuff is so geeky and fun okay so that's the google photos app and we used the google photo scan app in conjunction with it so that's cool let's get into the google search app you probably already have this on your phone right you have the g app now if you don't see it if you're an apple user i'm not sure anymore i've had this so long i don't know if it's a default or app or not if you don't see it go to your app store type in google search and it will either tell you open it which means it's already on your phone or it'll say download it so either way you're going to want to get this on your phone okay so google lens is now built into the google search app so what can it do well first when you open the app you see in the search box we've seen the microphone for a while we know we can dictate searches we can tell it as long as we've activated the microphone on the on the phone we can speak our search and it will search for it but google lens gives us that access to use our camera built into our phone within our search so this is just like google.com on your computer but we're talking on the phone so we're gonna tap the google lens app and let's see what it can do here's a non-genealogy application so this is a photograph have you seen this photo where is it it's behind me it's my daughter lacey and she's my middle of three daughters so this was us one day and we were all dressed up that day and you say oh i'm over at lisa's house oh i love that purse where'd you get that purse okay so we're gonna go to the google app tap lens and we're going to point our phone at the picture okay and we're going to point it right at that purse oh there's a dot tap it there you go you can buy the purse you can buy it online right now no it's a michael kors purse i saw this pop up and i'm like oh i got a good deal at the outlet store i didn't pay that much money um but it's a beautiful royal blue michael kors purse and it gives you the exact make and model it'll show you the newer versions i mean that's pretty amazing it grabbed it right out of the picture so what else is behind me my typewriter this old typewriter we found in the garage my mother-in-law's garage after she passed away and it belonged to her father sidney mansfield so you might remember sidney mansfield from the centennial syncopators from salem oregon that we talked about in uh episode six here's some fun okay you guys this is an interactive hey you're in chat let's get really interactive grab your phone okay and tap and open the google search app there's there's mine you could also do this just open your camera app this will work too but the google lens will work let's do google lens tap lens in the search hold it up to the qr code over here and it will take you oops it'll uh tap the little button it'll take you to our site even with your phone if you've been out to a restaurant recently you've noticed they're not giving you paper menus anymore right and typically they'll have a qr code on the table or they'll show you a card you open your your camera app on your phone and just point it at the qr code so this is a little interactive video today and that'll take you to episode six if you missed it so you can learn more about sydney not only did we talk about sydney in terms of searching for him with google but we also used him in a project that i made this huge poster of the centennial syncopaters but i digress okay so this is the typewriter and if you look at you think oh what kind of typewriter is that we're going to go to the google search app and we're going to tap the lens icon and just point it at the typewriter okay notice it's not only scanning the image it's getting all of the text that appears on it it's a vintage royal manual typewriter here's where you can purchase one yourself whether it's on etsy or it's on ebay or it's on amazon wherever it is if you first you're going to typically see the ability to purchase the item if you continue to go through you can do additional searches and learn the history of this item how old is it um all the background who created it the patent the whole nine yards so you can go up here to the search once you've got the initial search and type in the word history it'll refocused away more from the shopping items and get you into the actual history of the item so if you've got something in your house and you haven't really looked into you know you know you inherited it but what's the background on this item this is a way a fun way to learn more about it really easy without hardly any typing at all so here's another item okay so i was going through um grandma briquette's scrapbooks and i came across this cool thing now i think i was using an example the reason i got focused on this was i was doing a presentation and i was looking for examples on youtube and i think if you've seen my google search methodology uh video it's part of premium membership on my website i show this email that i got from somebody and she was talking about her dad was into drag racing and we found she found an old video on youtube and it's him on the on the speedway in the 1960s it's amazing okay so we teach a lot about how to use youtube but it got me when i saw this in grandma's scrapbook i was like oh wow okay cool this is the official program from the san jose speedway um i'm not sure what year doesn't say right on the cover but i know that um oh and then inside it says 1930. so my grandmother's brother-in-law as you can see here was dick loveland was a racer for many years so i thought well i wonder what google lens could help me with this so open the lens the google search app point at the item tap the button it found a copy of the same exact brochure online now why is this helpful when i tapped this i found this guy in his website he is like the number one expert on old racing specifically in california and in specifically san jose and there is the same brochure so if i want to learn more about it i want to find out if there's an archive a photograph somewhere i want to know if there's rosters of guys who drove cars and get more records on dick loveland this is the guy to ask and within seconds of using my phone and pointing it at this brochure i've got that information way faster than me trying to do typing words into google search and figuring out what's the right thing to put in here to try to find the right search results visual and i've talked about this a lot in a lot of my my presentations visual is so much faster when it comes to search uh in my google books class we talk about this um that video is on premium membership if you do the visual version of looking at the results you're going to be able to scan much faster to get things that you want to find in many cases so it's kind of a strategy to help speed up your genealogical research when you know the one thing we're all hurting for is more time right so anything that saves a bit of time is kind of a nice thing all right so there's the search feature let's tap this tap google lens and i opened up the brochure and i'm look at how it see it's kind of trying to grab text that appears when i zeroed right in i saw a name i wanted to see if i could learn more about it could this tell me any more about individual people if i tap the button and see that little bar now you can kind of select which text you want you just drag it just like you would when you're you know typing a text or something it searched on his name and found him in the 1940 census this is so cool i mean that's pretty cool so you can log into your ancestry account and it would take you and you could go and look up george theobald and of course as i scroll down then i find more information and from there i could certainly add to my search i just thought it was really cool to kind of test this theory of when you're looking at documents you're standing in a library you know could you point at something and just get a whole lot more information really fast it's kind of cool to know and the other thing to keep in mind as we're talking about this is that there's what it can do today but then as fast as machine learning is moving and it's learning way way faster than we will ever learn as humans think of what this technology may be able to do for us in the future and that's what we want to really keep our eye out for is what's coming what can it do for us and be looking for those opportunities particularly in our research so here's another item now this is a i didn't know what it was at first when i first got it it was in two pieces and i looked at them like well they they kind of go together you know what it looked like something was missing and then um we showed it to bill's godfather and he looked at me oh he's an engineer and he he just twisted it around put it together and it's a shelf it looked like some kind of a shelf so that's pretty cool so i had bill install this uh on the wall in my bedroom and i put a little jar of buttons on it and it's kind of fun by my sewing machine this belonged to my great grandmother grandma briquette's mother louise nikolowski and if you've followed me at all you're familiar with the name louise nikolowski she's she was from prussia so i thought i've i had done many searches on this shelf i have looked up for iron shelves and planter shelves and ornate and i've done visuals or i really could not find a specific exact match for this shelf online and it was kind of frustrating because i'm like i should know how to google and i just really couldn't nail it so i really didn't know exactly what the purpose of the shelf was i assumed that it was kind of a plant shelf and it very likely could have been used as a plant shelf so last night as i was putting this together i thought i'm going to go back okay so i'm going to move away the one i just did and i'm going to point my camera in google search the lens take a little you know press the button the first image is the exact same shelf and the fourth one as well i was really blown away i was blowing myself away with this because i tried so hard to find this through word text type searches and with not any luck so the first one brought me to this site this person sells all these different little pieces so it does look like it's a piece of something so we can go back and we can look at the other one here down below tap that one then it gives you a little button to visit the site this goes to antiques navigator and what's beautiful about these antique sites even if they're selling them they're going to tell you so much more about what these items are so as i scrolled down they had a lot of stuff for sale but i was really had my fingers crossed that this person who's probably appraised it figured out what it was put it up for auction they're gonna be able to tell me what this thing was really used for antique cast iron golden e stove or range warming shelf so originally this shelf was probably next to great grandmother's stove range versus maybe later she used it for a plant shelf i think my grandmother probably did but how cool to be able to figure that out and it even does that i think that's so neat i love that little shelf it's so cute and now i love that i know the history and it really amazes me that google lens could do in seconds what i really hadn't been able to do in you know half an hour of searching on my computer using regular google.com search in fact i got so determined to figure out what kind of shelf that was i went to ancestry and i got into their their whole sears catalog which goes way back uh they have all the old stairs catalogs and i went through them and went through them and of course i'm looking for shelves and plant shelves and nothing looked like it so it'll be interesting to go back and see in the stove section if that appears you might notice uh that this person on the left is somebody you may have seen before margaret scully so in episode 18 we talked about my other great great grandmother margaret scully and did a lot of research in ireland and finally made some huge strides on who her parents were and what county they were from if you missed that take your phone open i think it's even simpler when it comes to qr codes just open your camera app and hold it up to the qr code and it would take you there you'll see a little pop down that says oh you want to go this website you can go this website so you can learn more about the irish research that i did i did a consultation with an irish expert and then i did a follow-up segment uh episode on all of the filling in of all the gaps that i was able to do once i had these key missing pieces so i love this photograph it's four generations and what's interesting is when i got this copy of it it came with the typed caption on it so i would know who each person was so i want to show you what google lens can do for you in situations like this so we're going to tap that google search app and get it close to the picture okay so we're in text mode you can see there's a little text on the button and if you tap select all it'll just grab all the text that it can see through the camera lens and see it highlighted it you can tap copy text okay so now it's copied it to the clipboard of your phone i'm gonna go to my notes app and press and hold so i can paste now i've instantaneously instead of typing it all with my chubby fingers on my phone i can copy and paste it in then i could email this over to myself so it's a way of taking text on a page and turning it into instant type text and then you could send it to yourself you can copy and paste it into whatever document again so much faster also if i was at their house and i took a picture of it um but i really wanted to make sure that i grabbed all these names that were now on this the people that i had not had names for before you know again i might want that second backup of having the text version as well as the photograph that i would take of somebody else's photograph so so many uses for this as you can see and gosh with your smartphone or if you have a ipad or a tablet it's going to be able to do all this kind of stuff using the google search app um okay awesome i see you've got questions bill says you've got questions so we're gonna definitely answer questions at the end and i'm gonna show you also how to get um to the app in fact let's talk about it right now if you don't have the google search app on your phone i'm going to open my iphone get to my home screen right and on the iphone there's a blue app with an a app store now on google i think it's going to be called google play i think that's what the app store is called and you know what when you're not sure i know an iphone you can swipe to the right and there's a search box at the top and i could type in google search app so even if you can't find the app store you could type in app store and it's going to take it to you that spot on your phone but i'm going to tap the app store and then on an iphone again at the bottom in the menu i see search so i'm they're trying to show me all kinds of apps they want me to get i don't want these i'm going to tap search and now i see here's my search box i can tap in the search field and type in google search i'm going to type in google search i'll bet you could just do google it would probably be the very first app it is the very first app there's always an ad at the top so i want me to get the amazon app but here's the google search app now mine says open and that's because i already have the app on my phone so if i tap open it's going to just automatically find wherever it was buried on my phone and go open it if yours says download it's because you don't have it yet so you're going to tap that and it takes a moment sometimes i know on my phone it'll it'll ask me for my apple password to make sure it's me because some apps cost money this one does not so when we tap that it downloads and then where do we find it well if you're like me and you have multiple pages of apps i usually go to the last screen if you just keep tapping you know swiping to the left oftentimes it'll load that app on the last screen basically in the last position and then you can move it from there but i'm pretty sure it's the google play store that you can get apps on android so that's how you can make sure that you've got the google search app on your phone once you've got it then one tap and we can see the little google lens right there that icon in our search box so something else that has come up a lot with google lens lately is its ability to do homework that's because a lot of kids have been home and and doing school from home and doing school online and so google really put a push on this and i just want to show you one element of what the homework feature can do because it's something that we might be able to apply for ourselves for family history but there's lots of other features within homework i mean it can do geometry it can do all kinds of stuff so here's an example of my grandfather's tombstone and uh you know one of the math problems that we do is we try to figure out how old somebody was when they passed away so i'm going to tap the google search app and i had jotted the the dates down on a piece of paper if you literally just point the camera and tap the button it will do the work for you so it tells you yeah he was 72 years old when he passed away and you can copy that to your computer you can copy the text it's it took handwritten did you notice this now i had told you it wasn't going to do very good with handwritten but i wrote it i printed it pretty you know clearly and it was able to get it notice that there's this little tray of little buttons i think the default tends to be the search one but if you tap that and you can just scroll the the scholarly hat that's the homework function you can see a shopping cart so it'll shop for stuff you can see the little drop pin in this um little row of buttons these round buttons and that will search locations you could take a picture of a location usually more well-known locations text and translate we're going to talk about translate in a minute so it did do printed handwritten writing and i think this is an example when i was saying about how it's progressing so quickly i know i've heard that other companies i think family search has been working on um different types of graphics and and writing and being able to translate those as well and ocr them so ocr plays into all this as well the ability to understand a handwritten item evernote can do that the evernote app and website can do that for notes so um as long as right now as long as it's kind of clear and printed you could do this um with a handwritten note so just kind of fun to know that that's there you've got kids in the house you might have them play with the homework version and do a little googling on it to see what else it can do for them reading okay so i write a column uh in every issue of family tree magazine and if you were maybe you couldn't find your glasses right that happens to me all the time or for whatever reason you would like google lens to read to you here's just an example using my column so we're going to go to the google search app and i go to my column here and i'm going to focus in on this little app obsession it's about google photos when you tap down below here's these options just like those circles were i'm going to text so i see the little document in the button and tap it that does the initial grabbing of text but there's a listen button i'm so obsessed with the google photos app lesson that i devoted an entire chapter to it in the newest edition of my book the genealogist's google toolbox third edition self-published this little powerhouse organizes and stores all your photos freeing up precious space on your smartphone so once you did the search to grab the text then in the options remember how we did it with the business card there were lots of little button options well one of the options in text mode is reading so if you ever wanted to have it read something to you uh maybe you're having trouble it's low like when i have trouble in low light sometimes grab your phone and have it read it to you who knew it did all this stuff who knew your phone could do all this stuff i i didn't just putting this together i learned so much it's amazing okay so here we talked about there was a translate circle so there was text and there was homework and shopping and locations there's also text uh translate and this is a picture this is one of uh louise nikolowski's i believe it's her sister and it was taken in orderlsburg which was east prussia in the 19th century so i have a book this book and i got this years ago and um it's of christ ordersburg but it's all in german and it talks about her village that she's from and you can use google lens to help you be able to read the book so we're going to tap and just point your phone at the book let's go to the page for greenwald which is where they lived and you can see it's already trying to detect text i'm going to tap the center button i'm in search mode right now now notice that it already has spotted that this is not english so it offered me do you want translate this is what the round circle that's what the translate option looks like now after searching we can tap to open this result in google translate takes a moment it's going to process it there at the top is the german this is all of it translated it's amazing so if you've got some of those kinds of books or documents or pdfs that you get online you can translate them you know none of this is perfect we've i think i said that at the beginning i'm going to keep saying it it's not perfect but dog gone it it can do it a way better translation than i ever could and i could copy this text we're going to copy all and then i could go over into my notes app and just paste it or i could paste it into an email to myself i think it even gives you the ability to send it through to your computer so here i've pasted it it's all in english for me just awesome and if i tap the share button in my notes app on my iphone i can send that over to myself or do whatever else i want with it so kind of cool that you can do you it just opens up a whole nother world particularly if you are researching in other countries of being able to do translation and what i'm what we're really seeing here is that initially google has many different apps right has the photo scan app has google translate app there's a lot of if you go to your app store and just type in google you'll see many different apps but what we're really seeing here is it all coming together through the google search app and specifically through google lens so we may end up seeing some of these other apps eventually disappear because they fine-tune that technology brought it over and built it into the google search app and you end up with this kind of one-stop shopping google search app you can also identify uh well-known people probably not your ancestors necessarily except for maybe in google photos it could match them up but you could point this at the picture of somebody famous and it would probably be able to find that person for you and locations you could point at a picture of buckingham palace it's going to know it's buckingham palace in the future i think we will be able to look at all types of locations no matter what they are people whether or not they're famous how about even being able to point at a book and just be able to search within the book oh you can already do that you want to see this is so fun okay have you ever been to a conference and you go oh i want that book and you're going to buy that book or you're at the library oh i should check that out or maybe i should do an interlibrary loan but you don't want to do that when it's a book you already have and if you're like me there's a lot of books on your shelves and you don't want to duplicate it correct wouldn't it be nice to be able to know if maybe this book is already available on google books for free and i don't need to do that if you've watched my google books presentation i mean that's just a whole other hour of amazing stuff that's in there that video is on premium google books has so many books there's no reason to be purchasing a book or going through all the trouble of interlibrary loan if you can already get access to it so this is my book [Laughter] this is the county history of uh randolph county indiana and i paid a lot of money for it many many moons ago before google books i think it's a reproduction pretty sure it's reproduction but it's very cool so would i need to buy that now let's go look back to the google search app tap the lens i'm standing in front of my book go to the title page because the title page has the most information about the book even more than the cover particularly with old books tap my button history of randolph county indiana by tucker there's a read now button my friends you are reading the book you are searching within the book it is completely free all the chapters are hyperlinked it's all there so that not only confirmed i don't need to get another copy of this book but it actually gave me immediate access to read and search that county history i just whoa okay so i hope you've had fun with this i've had so much fun with this um and of course google is kind of my thing so i have a book the genealogist google toolbox i put a special coupon together for you guys because this book has a lot of search techniques um it has a whole new chapter on google photos and of course a whole section on google books i didn't even get google lens into this book yet but you've got this video but it's all these other tools you're going to learn so much about using them for family history particularly but just generally how to use them and then that's going to trigger now that you know that lens is available you're going to be able to tap into all the stuff we're talking about in this book and if you want to open up your phone and point it at the qr code it'll take you right to our store so that's google lens now you know now you know where it is and now you know what it can do and it's so much fun let's uh head back to see where all you guys are questions okay so let me see here i'm seeing some wow so let me look i'm going to scroll through really quickly i don't want to bore you guys but i want to see if there's questions uh i've just tried this with a postcard in german and it could translate it isn't that awesome i know it is crazy jenna's like wow this is crazy um okay lisa can this be used to compare photos to determine if they are the same person absolutely okay so um watch the google photos version now if you're watching live when this goes to video you're going to um you can go back and even hit the qr codes but tomorrow i will have show notes up on my website with all the links and you can also just go to genealogygems.com elevenses and there go watch the google photos episode um also my book goes into real specifics about how to use google photos to help identify other people and objects and things in your photos also in premium membership there is a class on how to identify old photos and google photos is one of the tools that we use it's using the lens technology to assess the face and it's using machine learning to constantly learn you'll be amazed how quickly it will spot the same face regardless of age which is just mind-blowing in all these different images and then you can also train it remember we talked about kind of the training version like we did in newspaper navigator last week so it will prop up and it will say i've got these two faces is this the same person and you can confirm or say no it's not you can also of course add the name of a person to a face so then you can start searching by their name and also find these um faces so uh and genebud says if this could translate old handwriting that would be amazing i think that will be on the way because i know that they're working on that at places like family search so i wouldn't be surprised keep stay here stay at elevenses you know i'll tell you about it first if i hear about it uh let's see here questions questions okay i'm so glad you guys are having fun with this oh china oh yeah oh lucinda china patterns so you take a picture of any china cup that has a particular pattern particularly the bottom of the cup as well it's going to show you if that cup is for sale somewhere if it's available it's going to help you identify it that's going to be amazing because we talked about that one website that does that and this can do it and it will do it even more extensively which is amazing i used google search to identify the make and model of my great grandfather's new car in 1913 absolutely absolutely that's a perfect um example for it okay i'm looking so i'm gonna go back to the very end if you have an urgent urgent question put it in the chat and put question in all caps so i can see it but um i see thumbs ups and smiley faces so i'm hoping that means that you had a really good time and you're kind of seeing the potential of the impact that this can have on the work that you do and for me it's um it's not just the application of family history but it's really in your life you know there's so many other things that you think this could solve this problem like identifying plants it also can identify animals so if you say oh that's the cutest little dog what kind of dog is that take a picture of it it'll tell you the breed question do you know if it will translate from english to other languages i'm almost convinced it can because we know that google translate can do that and again complete chapter on google translate in the book but i didn't try it using english first but it's probably not going to prompt you because it it knows you're an english speech speaker it knows a lot about you it's not going to prompt you and say oh this text isn't english do you want this in french but if you do go through remember the selections those little buttons those little round things we can tap translate and i think there you'll be able to say well we know you're detecting english what language do you want because we know we can do that on the google translate app excuse me website if for some reason because i haven't tested it if it doesn't do that go to your app store and download the free google translate app it does it absolutely for sure and if your premium member watch the google books class because i show you how to translate using your phone foreign language text from your screen so that's kind of fun can this be done on a home computer so marilyn the thing with that is um i was looking at that because i figured that might be a question if by chance you don't have a smartphone google lens is built into google photos so if i only had a desktop computer i would really be tapping into using google photos to accomplish these things for me um it you don't see the google lens icon in the search box at google.com i have some videos actually they're very popular they've been out for several years on image search at our youtube channel here so youtube.com genealogygems if you're watching the video replay later you're right here in the youtube channel now i hope you'll click subscribe if you if you really like this please encourage us and click the subscribe button and then look under the google play list or do a search of our channel for google i have a google image search that will show you ways to use pictures to do search but you're not going to see the lens icon in the search box i think really it's going to be using the google photos that's where they're focusing right now but you know that can change too we may see it tomorrow so who knows um yes discount code is lens thank you bill in all capital letters and that's 20 off question i can't get the icon into oh it moved hang on into my search bar what am i doing wrong okay bev i hope that you're using on a mobile device the google search app so not going into let's say the safari browser app and typing google.com because that won't do it we need the google search app itself on a mobile device and then you should see lens now it's possible if you don't have in your settings that you're allowing the google search app to access your camera it's possible and i i have it set up to do that so i don't see that but it's possible that would remove the lens icon because it knows you don't have access to it i could be wrong i definitely could be wrong with that um but that would be one thing i would do if you're for sure using the google search app and you're not seeing it go into your settings make sure that you're giving this google search app access to your camera and go back and see if it's there oh great for me it detected german and translated to english wonderful i have an iphone and google photos loaded and i'm not finding google lens inside of it i was able to download the google search and the lens is there yes so in the google photos app what we did was google lens is already baked in that's what it does that's how it works so it's already baked in you don't need an icon but what we did do in the google photos app was we went to the three horizontal lines the settings i little button in the upper left hand corner and that's where we accessed photo scan so photo scan was the way if i didn't already have the photograph on my camera roll and i wanted to take a picture and i didn't want any glare i would use photo scan so that's why we that was the connection we made was that photo scan happened to be in google photos if you don't have a worry about the glare issue you can just take a photograph of something it'll automatically if you have it set up to go into google photos then just open your google photos app you'll see the lens icon there all right i promise i'm going to go through all the chat and i will answer any other questions that i haven't already answered i'll do that in our show notes tomorrow i'm going to have all the details i know it was it was a fire hose of google lens today but don't worry because it's going to all be laid out for you at genealogygems.com elevenses did you like this please give it a thumbs up that is just huge to help other genealogists find us and they are finding us so i'm so appreciative when you do that and i wanted to leave you with kind of um a final thought so we said at the beginning that um let me go back here hang on so remember when charlie brown said if life were a camera i'd have to put the lens cap on it i hope you're feeling a little less like that today my friends i hope this is you now an hour later after spending an hour with all of us here at 11's with lisa and um i just thank you so much when you join us here it's so much fun for me i hope it was for you too god bless you and your family and get out there and do a happy dance have a wonderful wonderful day bye [Music] you

Channel: Lisa Louise Cooke's Genealogy Gems

Views: 5,935

Rating: 4.9188404 out of 5

Keywords: genealogy, family history, lisa louise cooke, genealogy research, geneology, search strategies, genealogy gems, elevenses with Lisa, google lens, google photos, how to use google lens, search pictures, search images, google translate, google lens beginners, google lens in google photos

Id: ymSTtysmC6I

Length: 53min 43sec (3223 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2020