Google Photos will search on an emoji

In 2015, demonstrating the rise of the emoji as a major tool for communications, Domino’s Pizza enabled the ability for users to place an order using a pizza emoji. Perhaps learning from that feature, the team with the Google Photos team has rolled out a similar feature that users can tap into to search through their library of photos.

Users can enter an emoji in the search bar, say for a dog or for Halloween, and the Google Photos app will return what it thinks are photos related to the emoji. The search works the same as if text were entered for the search string and still does not require users to have tagged their photos in any manner.

The big question that seems to be lurking out there is whether this is part of Google’s April Fools’ Day “updates” or if this is an actual thing that will stick around. For now at least, the new visual search works on emojis as demonstrated in the video below.