A few weeks ago, Google announced a bunch of new features targeted at digital travel planning, such as hotel price tracking and deploying AI as a personal guide. Among them was also a neat trick that could extract address details from screenshots and save them to Google Maps.
That feature has now started to roll out slowly. Users started receiving it this week, it seems, and earlier today, Google also released a blog update instructing users on how to enable it. For now, it is focused on iOS, but the facility will soon land on Android, as well.
Why does it matter?
I often save Google Search listings, social media ads, and blog posts about a certain place, restaurant, monument, or stuff related to my travel plans as screenshots. It’s the quickest way to save such information, especially for scenarios where you don’t have the time to type it all as a note.
When I eventually return to them, I mostly use Google Lens to extract the text details from those screenshots, and accordingly save them either in my planner notes, or custom lists in Google Maps’ “You” section.
Now, thanks to Gemini, the AI assistant will automatically look for such information in screenshots saved on your phone, and add them to a dedicated list in the Google Maps app. “Places you save will show up on the map, and you can easily share the list with your travel buddies,” Google said back in March.
The new feature is somewhat similar to Gemini’s file analysis capabilities. When you open a document, let’s say a PDF, in the Files app, you will see a Gemini chip at the top that lets you ask Gemini questions about the contents of the file. It works quite well, actually.
How to enable it?
In order to let Gemini scan your screenshots and automatically add them to a dedicated list in Google Maps, follow these steps:
1. Make sure that you are running the latest version of the Google Maps app on your iPhone.
2. Open the Google Maps app and tap on the “You” option in the bottom row.
3. On the next page, you will see a new list named Screenshots, with a “Try it out!” badge attached to it.
4. When you tap on it, the app will show a brief tutorial video on how it works. At this point, you will need to grant the app permission to access the media files stored locally on your iPhone.
5. The next time you take a screenshot with address-related information mentioned in it, it will be scanned in the background. When you open the Google Maps app afterward, it will inform you that there are new location details ready for review.
6. Approve the addresses that you want to save, and they will automatically be added to the list. Users will also be able to do a manual screenshot scan from within the “You” tab in the app.
7. The saved addresses will appear in the “Screenshots” list and the map view.