Google announced a new bookmarking feature for Google Images earlier this week. The new feature takes a page from the Pinterest playbook, as it allows users to bookmark their favorite images. So instead of trying to remember where you found a particular image (which never works), you can simply hit the “bookmark” button and it will automatically save to your account.
Pinterest has long been viewed as the leading platform for image curation. According to the company’s own website, it has 70 million active users with 50 billion pins posted across 1 billion boards. Of course, Pinterest continues to grow even larger with each passing year. But Google is hoping to duplicate some of the social media network’s success with its new image bookmarking feature “Collections”.
So, how does Google’s new image bookmarking feature work? The search engine giant explained the feature in a blog post, saying that when you find an image on your mobile device, you simply tap the star icon to save it. This automatically saves the image to your Google account in a new feature called Collections, allowing you to access it later by logging into this account. Furthermore, Google says that users can organize their saved images in folders, much like Pinterest. To add an image to a folder, tap the pencil icon next to it.
It’s important to note, however, that this feature is currently only available for mobile devices (both Android and iOS). There’s still no word on when or even if Google will introduce this feature to the desktop.
This begs the question: why didn’t Google launch this image bookmarking feature for desktop users? While it didn’t provide an explanation, it could be attributed to the growth of mobile Internet usage. Numerous reports have found mobile Internet usage to have surpassed desktop usage, meaning more people now access the Internet on their smartphones and tablets than desktops. So perhaps Google is trying to capitalize on this ever-growing demographic by introducing new mobile-specific features like image bookmarking.
“The perfect image of your next big adventure, knitting project or style-changing haircut is bound to exist somewhere out there. But what happens once you find the image? Take a screenshot? Maybe try to save the webpage? Starting today there is an easier option: you can now star and bookmark images directly from Google’s image search in your mobile browser,” explained Google software engineer Diego Accame.
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