Yes, I know. I hate that it’s two steps, and that it opens a new tab. I’d rather never see Lens, ever. It’s not even slightly useful and I hope it goes away. or they give me a preference to turn it off forever
Firefox still has the regular image search.
In that case, I may have a workaround for @squeegee. You need an extension that can change your user agent so that Chrome/Edge appears to be Firefox.
I tested it with this one:
That said, this won’t work forever. Though maybe someone will write a better fix.
That worked!! Wow, thank you so much, @BigT !!!
Resurrecting this thread to point out something new I stumbled upon recently.
There’s an option to disable Lens in chrome://flags. Just type that into your address bar, then search for “Lens”, and then disable “Enable Lens features in Chrome.”
It seems Google actually listened to people who complained, as I couldn’t find anything like that back when I wrote my previous post.
Thanks for this. Found the option, disabled it, restarted chrome and, voila, back to a normal image search. Yay!
I did find one thing that slightly redeems Google Lens: it’s ability to search for text in an image; occasionally comes in handy.
Thanks for that. I’ve been too lazy to go change it again after it was switched the second time. It seems to be a slight variation on what was linked to in this earlier post: