Alternatives to Google Lens

ITT - Apple users who don't know what Lens is and how useful it is 😂

Yeah. For apple users Lens is not the simple andtoid camera app (which yes can translate text on the fly and read QR codes) - Lens is a visual search tool that can answer queries based on pictures.

Like if you take a picture of a tree you can ask what species it is, or a picture of a person you can ask where the clothes are from etc.
- Stupid hardware fixing I've never seen before - Lens will tell me what it is
  
  Apple is about five years behind, then will announce it as a revelation they came up with, as usual 😂
- If you have the google app, on the landing page there is a camera icon. You can either use lens live that way, or upload a pic and it will tell you what plant/animal/etc it is, sometimes, or iirc it will translate texts. But it does both in real time too. I have an iPhone and use it a lot.
You can use Lens on iPhones just fine. It’s part of the google app.
If you have the google app, on the landing page there is a camera icon. You can either use lens live that way, or upload a pic and it will tell you what plant/animal/etc it is, sometimes, or iirc it will translate texts. But it does both in real time too. I have an iPhone and use it a lot.

My main gripe with Google Lens is that it replaced Google Image Search on their browser. Used to be able to drag/drop an image into Google and it'd do an instant search for all similar/identical images. Now it opens Google Lens and it just gives me a bunch of "related links" instead of a proper image search.

To get the old functionality back, I need to use a "Google image search" add-on in my Firefox browser. It opens the old Google image search page.

I mostly use it to find higher resolution versions of old, grainy images, but Google Lens took that functionality away from me.

Tineye usually produces better results
You don't need an extension to do that. I can use image search just fine with images.google.com.
- I go to images.google.com for text searching images, but if you drag an image into the search bar there, it opens Google Lens now. That's my complaint. I want it to search for other versions of the image like it used to, not open Lens.

I'm just a hobbyist, and not familiar with anything specific, or prepackaged in an app, but there are probably examples posted in the projects section of hugging face (=like the github + dev social-ish thing for AI). I'm not sure what is really possible locally as far as machine vision + text recognition + translation. I think it would be really difficult to build an accurate model to do this on the limited system memory of a phone. I'm not sure what/if Google is offloading onto their servers to make this happen or if they are tuning the hell out of an AI model to get it small enough. I mean, there is a reason why the Pixel line has a SoC called a Tensor core, (it is designed for AI), but I haven't explored models or toolchains for mobile deployment.

Tineye

Tineye sucks. Yandex has the best reverse image search
- I use the RevEye extension that allows to image search with multiple image searches and Yandex always provides the best results.

Yandex has the best reverse image search, and I think it can also identify some stuff or products in the image. I don't think it does text tho, I could be wrong.

So, is Google Lens just an 'reverse image search'? Never used it.

No, you can take a picture of something and it will pick out data from the image. e.g. You could photograph a menu in another language and translate it. It's also a QR code scanner. It might do other things I don't know about.

Edit: ok, reading this thread it does lots of other stuff 😆
Nah , you can scan docs , you can also translate text in real time witth it !

If it's only for a reverse image search, I use tineye.com . That being said, it doesn't have all the functionalities of lens, like it doesn't have an integrated AI to recognize the content of a pic or anything...

For copying text from a real world document, I also use OCR, which you can find on F-Droid.

What is it? What functionality are you looking for?

Lens is a visual search tool. Take a picture, ask it to search or answer a question based on what's in the picture. Like take a picture of a tree and ask it what species is it
- Oof. Sounds like it needs a huge back end with a ton of pre-processed data.

If you have an iphone, it does that natively Take a picture of the text, select it and hit translate

Google Lens doesn't just translate text, it contextually searches based on what it sees and interprets in an image. The translation stuff is already built into the Android camera app; Lens is something more
- Sorry I haven’t used it in a long while

Depends on what do u , use it for ? I hardly use it except for qr code scans , so any code scanners work for me !