Find Your Photos Using Google Search

Here's a cool Google Search feature that I missed: search for [my photos] and you'll see the latest images you've uploaded to Google+ Photos. Obviously, you need to log in to your Google account and join Google+ if you haven't done that already.

You can also search your photos directly from the Google Search box: enter [my photos], followed by one or more keywords and you'll see the results almost instantly. This works with the image recognition feature, so you'll get results for [my photos portrait] or [my photos flowers] even if the photos don't include "portrait" or "flowers" in the file name or captions. "To make computers do the hard work for you, we've also begun using computer vision and machine learning to help recognize more general concepts in your photos such as sunsets, food and flowers," informs Google.

Another way to use this feature is to search for [my photos], followed by the name of an album. Google will show some photos from that album. You can also search from [my photos from Paris last year], [Daniel's photos] (if you follow Daniel on Google+), [Daniel's photos from Germany 2011], [Matt Cutts photos cats], [Sergey Brin photos ocean].

It also works for people tagging, so you can search for [photos of Sergey Brin]. They're restricted to the photos uploaded by the people/pages you follow.

Unfortunately, if you click "Photos from you and your friends", Google will send you to the Google+ Photos homepage, instead of the list of search results.

To switch to the regular Google Image Search results, click the globe icon next to the gears button. This will hide personal results, but you can switch back by clicking the people icon.

{ via Inside Search }