Google is taking a page out of Pinterest’s playbook

One need only look at Pinterest’s 100 million active monthly users to know that image bookmarking is really popular at the moment, and Google wants in on the action. Those of you who have a Google account will now be able to save images and organize them into collections in much the same way Pinterest users can, but it’s currently limited to mobile users in the United States. Although there’s currently no Google+ integration, there’s a good chance that the feature will be tied to Google+ Collections in the future. 

In an effort to attract some of Pinterest’s 100 million active monthly users, Google has announced that it’s rolled out a new feature for those doing image searches on mobile devices that offers users a simple way to save images and organize them into collections for easy access at a later date. You’ll have to be logged into your Google account to use the feature, which means you can access your saved items from multiple devices. Saving the images is simply a matter of doing a search, tapping on the picture you want to keep, then hitting the star button. Once you’ve saved a few images, you can organize them into folders by tapping the pencil-shaped edit icon. “Create a grouping such as ‘haircuts for the winter’ or ‘snowman ideas’ and your image will be added to a folder with similar ones,” says Google on a blog post. While Google is looking to take on Pinterest with the image bookmarking tool, the company will also be hoping that the feature helps attract new users to its Google+ Collections – a way for the social networking site’s users to share groupings of posts on a particular topic. At the moment, the image search collections aren’t tied to the Collections on Google+, but bringing the two together at a later date looks like a strong possibility.