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lingolens

Search in Google Lens in lingo!

Tired of irrelevant results of reverse image search? Yeah, search results can be VERY different because of your language environment!

Lingolens allows:

  • search images in Google Lens with specific languages and countries, excluding known results
  • visually select a region of the image to search (optional)
  • generate one HTML report with all the results
  • compare the target image with the result images via a sticky preview
  • a pretty user interface is supported!

The full list of supported languages and countries is here.

How it works

Google Lens used to return server-rendered HTML for the upload endpoint, so a plain requests.post was enough. That's no longer the case — Lens now requires a JavaScript-capable client and aggressively detects bots. So lingolens drives a real Chromium instance via Playwright with stealth patches and a persistent profile (cookies are reused, captcha state survives between runs).

For each selected language, a fresh browser context with that locale= is opened. This makes the JS upload request honour the locale (hl=ko, Accept-Language: ko-KR, navigator.language etc.) and Google really returns different result sets across languages.

User interface

Report example

Check example of search results: report.html.

Installation

pip3 install -r requirements.txt
playwright install chromium

The second command downloads the Chromium build Playwright drives (~150 MB, one-off).

Usage

As a browser-based tool

streamlit run web_search.py

Streamlit serves the UI at http://localhost:8501/. Pick languages (mandatory) and countries (optional), upload an image. Optionally toggle Select a region of the image to search — drag a box on the image, then double-click inside the box to apply the crop. Then press Search in Google Lens with selected languages.

While the search runs you'll see a live status panel with per-language progress (KO: 33 total on page, 15 new (rest already seen)). After it finishes you get:

  • a Download report button (full HTML report),
  • a 3-column gallery of result thumbnails with [LANG] tags and links to source pages,
  • a sticky preview of the original/cropped image in the bottom-right, so you can visually compare while scrolling.

First-run captcha

The very first time Lens may show a captcha. If that happens, run once with:

LINGOLENS_HEADLESS=0 streamlit run web_search.py

This makes the Chromium window visible — solve the captcha manually. Cookies are stored in ~/.lingolens-profile, so subsequent runs in default (headless) mode reuse them and shouldn't trigger captcha again.

As CLI tool

./lingolens.py example.jpg

You will get the report.html file in the same folder.

Languages are read from langs.txt, one per line:

ru
en
pl

Environment variables

Variable Default What it does
LINGOLENS_HEADLESS 1 0 to show the Chromium window (useful for solving captcha)
LINGOLENS_PROFILE_DIR ~/.lingolens-profile Where Playwright stores its persistent profile (cookies, captcha state)

TODO

  • Customization of language list for a search (simple config file)
  • Language filter in a report
  • Visual region selection (crop)
  • Inline gallery and sticky original preview in the Streamlit UI
  • Standalone exe-file for Windows
  • Checkbox for switching to thumbnails instead of full images
  • Validation of lang-country combinations
  • Automatic captcha-solving fallback

Credits

Thanks to BLACK for inspiration and support!

Designed and developed for solving tasks on OSINT investigation forum.