How to Disable Google Lens in the Chrome Browser

Google has added tight Lens integration to Chrome 127 and onward. Its button appears in the URL box, in the search flyout (Ctrl + F), and in the main menu. If you do not use Google Lens, you may find this change pretty annoying. Here is how to disable Google Lens in the Chrome browser and remove the Lens button from everywhere.

Google Lens is a search tool that can look for information on the Internet by using image or text in that image. While this sounds similar to the popular Google Images feature, it looks different. Google Lens takes a screenshot of any part of the open web page and send it to "home" servers for processing. Once image recognized, Google opens with all information that it could find on the topic. Here's its official description:

Google Lens in Chrome makes it easy to search anything you see on your screen. Search within a video you’re watching, a slide in a livestream, or an image on a webpage. Google Lens will give you answers right there, in your tab, and you can continue browsing with the new information you’ve found.

The feature is familiar to Android users, as it is integrated in apps on Android for quite long, specially in camera and gallery apps. Now it has become available in Chrome on desktop.

Not everyone is happy with the change. Some users would like to get rid of the Lens addition. Thankfully, there are a couple methods to get that done.

Disable Google Lens in Chrome

To turn off the Lens feature in the Google Chrome browser, do the following.

1. Open a new tab (Ctrl + T).
2. Click in the URL box and type the following: chrome://flags/#enable-lens-overlay, then hit Enter.
3. On the next page, to the right of Enable Lens Overlay option, select Disabled from the drop-down menu.
4. Finally, click on the Relaunch button at the bottom to apply the change.

This is how you disable the Lens feature in Chrome.

However, flags are proven to be a not reliable solution. Over time, the developers are removing them, leaving the user alone in the dark. Where available, I recommend using Chrome policies. Luckily, such a policy exist for Lens, and we can enable it with little efforts.

Remove Google Lens Button from Chrome using Group Policy

1. Press Win + R and type regedit.exe in the Run box to open the Registry Editor.
2. On the left, open the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies key.
3. Again on the left, right-click the Policies folder, and select New > Key. Name the new key Google.
4. Now, right-click Google and select New > Key. Name the new key Chrome. So the key path will be  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome.
5. Right-click the Chrome key and select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value from the menu.
6. Name the new value LensOverlaySettings and double-click it to change its data.
7. Set its value data to 1 and click OK.
8. Restart your computer for the change to take effect.

You now have the Google Lens feature disabled in your browser.

Ready-made REG files

To save your time, I have prepared two REG files. You can download them here:

Download REG files

Extract them to any directory, and open the Disable Lens.reg file.

Confirm the User Account Control prompt if it appears, and the click Yes one more time in the Registry Editor confirmation. The above reviewed change will be added to the Registry. Restart the computer and you are good to go.

The other file, Enable Lens.reg , will re-enable the Lens feature.

If you are a Linux user, there is now Registry. Instead, there is a policy json file which you can create or modify as follows.

Disabling Lens in Chrome for Linux

1. Open a root terminal, e.g. by typing sudo su - in a regular one if your run an Ubuntu-based OS.
2. Now type the following command mkdir -p /etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed and press Enter to create the directories where Chrome is looking for its policies.
3. Now run you favorite text editor, say nano, with the following argument: nano /etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/policies.json and hit Enter.
4. Enter the following text in your file:

   {
   "LensOverlaySettings": 1
   }

5. Save the changes. In nano, you need to press Ctrl + O for that and then Ctrl + X to exit it.
6. Restart your Chrome browser. You have removed Google Lens from Chrome on Linux.

💡Note that if you already have the policies.json file, add the "LensOverlaySettings" line as the last line before the closing curved bracket.

How to Use Google Lens

Even if you aren't familiar with Google Lens, you should not find it hard to use. After you click on the "Google Lens" button in the address bar, it will display a confirmation where you need to click "Continue".

The web page will be filled with a translucent mask. The cursor will turn into a crosshair, allowing you to select and capture the area of ​​the open website or document. The captured region is automatically sent to the neural network for processing. Quickly, you will get back a search result based on your screenshot, that will open in the side panel on the right of the browser window.

It is obvious that you can Google Lens with more than just web pages. You can search PDFs, images - anything that Chrome can open in its tab.

That's it.

Support us

Winaero greatly relies on your support. You can help the site keep bringing you interesting and useful content and software by using these options: