How to Search with a Screenshot in Windows 10
Windows 10 includes a cool feature that allows you to search with a desktop screenshot taken with a Snip and Sketch built-in app. The process is very convenient as it starts with a single click. For a captured screenshot, Windows 10 will use Bing to find similar images and and display the results in Microsoft Edge.
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Windows 10 comes with a search box in the taskbar that allows you to quickly type what you are looking for. When it receives focus, it opens the Search pane. If the search box is disabled, when the Search pane can be opened by pressing the Win + S shortcut keys.
Microsoft is actively working on the Windows Search. It constantly receives both major features and minor improvements. Just recently it was updated with the Dark theme support. Also, it shows Bing image of the day for some Insiders.
One of the recently added features to Windows Search is the ability to find images similar to a screenshot captured by the user. You create a snip of the screen area, and Windows 10 will find similar images with Bing Visual Search in Microsoft Edge. This feature can be useful when you need to find the source for some image embedded into a document, or find a larger image of what you see on the screen. Also, you can capture some error message and see if someone already faced it before you.
This post will show you how to search with a screenshot in Windows 10.
To Search with a Screenshot in Windows 10
- Open Search by clicking in the search box on the taskbar, or press Win + S.
- Click on the Search with a screenshot button in the search pane.
- If this is the first time you are starting a search with a screenshot, you need to confirm the operation.
- Snip and Sketch will open. Select a region to take a screenshot. You can use Rectangle Snip, Free-form Snip, Window Snip, or Full-screen Snip.
- Windows 10 will briefly show the "Searching for similar images on the web" splash screen.
- The search results will appear in Microsoft Edge. They are powered by Bing.
You are done.
The Visual Search in Bing will also extract the text from your screenshot (where available), and will provide links to pages that also contain similar images and text.
The feature is indeed useful, however, it is locked to the Bing search provider. The user cannot change the search engine and search for similar images using Google or any other search service.
That's it.
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OCR for screenshots seems to be quite useful feature. Thanks, Sergey!
I can´t see the icon at search panel
What Windows 10 version you are using?
is there a keybind for this? (like screen snip has a shortcut)
Google Image search is trash, and bing image search has no shortcut(key) and yandex image search is good as bing
Is this possible to disable? We have a client that wants to remove this feature.
is there a way to do this is windows 11?
Currently it lacks the required option. I do hope Microsoft will re-add it sooner or later.