Exploring The Game-Changing Pixel Screenshots Feature In Google Pixel 9

AI is everywhere and, with the Pixel 9 series launch last month, Google has made its priorities clear. We got to see a wide array of AI features make it to the new Pixels. But amid all the AI reveals, Pixel Screenshots felt like an instant game-changing feature that I’d actually use. So, as soon as the Pixel 9 landed at the Beebom office, I pounced on the chance to explore the feature. After spending a few hours with it, I think the Pixel Screenshots app is quite useful!

Deceivingly Simple, Heavily Useful

To use the AI feature, you will need to head over to the dedicated Pixel Screenshots app that the new Pixel 9 series ships with. The app in itself didn’t blow me away with its aesthetics as the screenshots glared at you right on the homescreen.

Apart from a couple of options, which I will get into later on, and a floating search bar at the bottom, there’s nothing special here. The homescreen aesthetics really did throw me off, but it’s exactly what I liked about it the most.

The app doesn’t distract you with unnecessary animations or elements, which is something I noticed with the redesigned Pixel Weather app as well. Google is streamlining these app UIs to let users focus on what they’re there for in the first place.

Using the search bar, you can type out the description of the screenshot you are looking for. Or, you can add a voice input to search for the respective screenshots. Within milliseconds, the app will showcase the screenshots that match your query.

I’m not going to get into the mechanism in detail, as you can check out our guide on how to use Pixel Screenshots for that. But, what I will share with you are some tests I carried out to see how effective the tool was.

When browsing through the web, I tend to screen grab a whole lot of Amazon listings as part of my window shopping ritual. As you would expect, those start piling up, and eventually, are lost in the rubble. However, by simply describing what I’m looking for, I could easily get to that screenshot without wasting a second.

I also tried it out with a couple of complicated product names like desktop GPUs and CPUs to see if it can do it as well, and it did. Next, being the Poke-nerd I am, I screenshotted a bunch of Pokemon and asked the tool to search for specific monsters. It did so without breaking a sweat.

Sometimes, you can also have a lot of vital information like contact numbers, addresses, and pins lying around in screenshots of chats, conversations, or emails to find them someday. Those essential bits can be easily found as well with the tool. Overall, it did remind me a bit of Microsoft’s Windows Recall demo and worked amazingly well.

An All-in-One Screenshot Manager

The Pixel Screenshots expand beyond the lines of “just a screenshot finder” to an overall solid screenshot manager. As I dug deeper into my exploration of the app, I noticed subtle things that made it even better.

For starters, since this is a screenshot-only app for the most part, you will get to see them stack up over time. That can make the app look very cluttered. To combat that, the app lets you classify screenshots into collections for ease of management.