A few days ago, Google brought a tiny, yet a significant change to its search engine, which except for publishers, disappointed almost everyone else. The company got rid of the handy “View Image” and “Search By Image” buttons from Google Images. The former essentially allowed users to sidestep the original source for downloading the image. The latter, while not as widely used as “View Image,” was basically a shortcut for querying Google through a picture instead of text. They’re things of the past now, and it’s time to move on, or is it?
In this day and age of third-party tools, I don’t think it is. Following the announcement, developers have come forward and brought both of those features back to life. In addition to that, if you know your way around Google, you can still easily access both of them officially, albeit with an extra step. Here’s how.
Access the “View Image” and “Search By Image” Buttons on Google Without any Third-Party Tool
The official workaround is quite straightforward. Instead of making use of the “View Image” button, you can simply click the image once, fire up the context menu (right-click on it), and hit “Open Image in a new tab” or “View Image” or whatever your browser’s equivalent is. That’s about it. You now have access to the full-size picture without loading the source website.
For performing a search with an image you came across on Google as the input, all you need to do is drag and drop it in the search bar rather than clicking the dedicated button.
Bring Back the View Image and Search By Image Buttons on Google
If you are one of those people who are too accustomed to the old buttons and find right-clicking a bit of an exercise, we have a solution for you as well.
You guys will have to download and install a little third-party tool on your browsers to resurrect the “View Image” and “Search by Image” buttons. It’s available for both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The extension functions as you’d expect and places both the options back where they used to be. It’s entirely free of cost as well and measures merely 30KB in size.
So that’s it for this quick guide; let us know in the comments section if you’re stuck at some step.
Related Read: Best Chrome Extensions for Image Download</strong>