Google Lens has made its way to the Google Chrome browser for desktops. You are no longer able to view your searched images in a separate Chrome tab. Chrome shows you images in a small pop-up sidebar instead. This isn’t very pleasant for many users and they look for ways to disable Google Lens. In this ongoing tutorial, I will show you the simple steps to disable Google Lens on Chrome browser. This tutorial works for all Google Chrome versions.

What is Google Lens and why it’s annoying?

Google Lens is Google’s image recognition software that is supposed to show you the information relevant to an object that it identifies using a neural network. You can either use an image to look for similar images or objects or you can simply use a camera to scan an object/image via Google Lens to find similar results.

Google Lens has been long integrated into Android smartphones. Users can use the camera to look for objects on the internet on the go.

Recently, Google implemented the Google Lens into the Google Chrome browser for desktops. Google Lens operates in a different way for desktops and it’s gotten really annoying.

The new Google Lens upon searching an image with Google.

Back in the day, you could right-click on any image and click on “Search image with google”. This would open a new tab displaying all similar images in the Google search.

The same option exists now, but it does something entirely different. It now opens up the Google Lens in a sidebar that pops up on the left side of the screen.

You can click on the “Find image source” button in the sidebar to open the Google Image Search. The sidebar stays on the screen in all the tabs until you manually close it.

If you are one of the users who find Google Lens annoying, take a look at the steps below to disable it.

How to Disable Google Lens on Chrome Browser

1. In the Google Chrome Address bar, type: Chrome://flags and hit enter.
2. In the Flags search, type “temporarily unexpire m107 flags” and press enter.
3. Now disable the Temporarily unexpired m107 flags.
   

   Disabling the M107 Flag.

4. Click on the Relaunch button on the bottom right.
5. When Chrome relaunches, go to Chrome://flags again.
6. In the Tabs search bar, type “Lens”.
7. Disable all the flags that mention “Lens”.
   

   Disabling all Google Lens Flags.

8. Also, find unified-side-panel in the flags and disable it too.
   

   Turning off the Unified Side Panel.

9. Click on the Relaunch button on the bottom right.
10. Search an image with Google now and it will take you to the image source on Google Search.
11. That’s all you had to do to get rid of the Google Lens.

Conclusion

Change is usually good, but not always. The same is the case with Google Lens. You can easily remove it while the Lens flag exists in the Chrome flags. Let’s hope that Google doesn’t permanently remove this flag making it impossible to revert to the old Google Image Search option in the Chrome Browser. If you have any other queries, feel free to reach out to us using the comment box below.

Also, check out: Chrome Browser Returns Google Captcha Everytime I Open A Site [SOLVED]

Tags: chrome browser google lensdisable google lens on chrome browsergoogle lens