Zooming In With Android
Steve Kelley
Sure, if you need a quick peek at something magnified, you can always open the camera on your Android phone and use the pinch gesture to make things a bit bigger. It’s handy and quick, but there are better options with more features. Say hello to the Google Magnifier for the Pixel phone and weZoom. Both apps are free and available in the Google Play Store.
The Google Magnifier app is only available on a Pixel 5 or newer, so if you have an earlier Pixel model or another Android phone, you’ll want to download weZoom Magnifying Glass as an alternative.
Regardless of which app you choose, the real advantage of either of these apps over using the camera with the pinch gesture is the many additional features available to adjust contrast, zoom level, brightness, and apply color filters to make images or text easier to see. These features are not often readily available when using the camera app alone.
weZoom App
weZoom runs on most Android phones. Install the app from the Google Play Store and open it.
The app opens with a view through the camera, with no magnification at first, and control buttons at the bottom of the screen. Zooming in or out is done with a swipe up or down, right or left, on the screen. The magnification level appears in the upper right corner of the screen.
weZoom Controls
From left to right along the bottom of the screen, the basic control buttons include full-screen toggle, flashlight toggle, pause camera, switch color filter, and advanced options. The control buttons remain at the bottom of the screen unless the full-screen toggle button is pressed, which hides all but the toggle button.
To the right of the full-screen toggle is the flashlight button, which turns the flashlight on or off. Of course, you could always open the phone’s settings to access the flashlight, but having it as one of the app’s controls is much handier.
In the center of the controls is the pause button. When pressed, the image on the screen is frozen until the button is pressed again to resume scanning as the phone is moved. When the pause button is pressed, a camera button appears to allow the image to be saved or shared. It was interesting to note that when the dialog box appeared to save the image, although the phone was held upright in portrait mode, the dialog box appeared on the screen in landscape view.
To the right of the pause button is the color filter button. By default, it is set to full color. Each touch of the button toggles to the next color filter. These include grayscale, inverted grayscale, yellow tint, and blue tint.
On the far right is the advanced options button, which opens a submenu of controls. These include a checkbox for continuous focus (checked by default), a color filter threshold slider (set to 50%), and camera exposure (brightness set to 50%). Beneath these controls are buttons, from left to right, for app settings, app info and guide, reset advanced options, and close.
App settings include a variety of options to customize the app. For example, high resolution on the camera can be turned on or off, a left-handed mode may be selected, and full-screen mode may be locked on or off. By default, the app can magnify up to 8x. In the app settings, however, this can be extended by adding 1x–6x to the default magnification for a possible total of 14x magnification.
Although the app is relatively intuitive to use, the app info and guide button opens a brief user guide that covers most details of the app.
weZoom in Brief
The weZoom magnifier can transform the phone into a video magnifier, with many of the features you’d expect to find in a separate device costing hundreds of dollars. The controls are easy to use, intuitive, and can be hidden in full-screen mode to maximize the viewing area on the screen. Increasing the magnification level to 14x makes weZoom handy and effective for distance viewing, as well as for magnifying text and nearby objects.
Magnifier by Google
For Pixel phone users with a Pixel 5 or newer, the Magnifier app by Google is another free app available from the Play Store that adds powerful magnification features to the phone. The Magnifier app may already be installed on Pixel 8 and newer phones. It is not compatible with Pixel tablets or Pixel Fold. It’s worth noting that in the Play Store, the app is called Magnifier App by Google, although it is also often referred to as the Pixel Magnifier.
Magnifier App Features
When the Magnifier app first opens, the controls at the bottom of the screen include a shutter button in the center, with plus and minus buttons on either side to increase or decrease the magnification. Like the weZoom magnifier, intuitive pinch gestures can also be used to adjust magnification. The magnification on the Google Magnifier is double what is available on weZoom and can go as high as 30x. This will not be useful for most close-up tasks or for reading text, but it can be very useful for reading signs or seeing landscape features at a distance.
Just above the shutter button on the left is a button to select either the front-facing or rear-facing camera. To the right of the shutter is the flashlight button. The flashlight button also becomes a slider when touched, allowing the brightness of the flashlight to be adjusted. The option to switch to the front-facing camera did not appear to be available in the weZoom app and could be a great feature for tasks such as personal care and applying makeup.
The central shutter button freezes the image when pressed and provides additional options to save or share the image. When the image is captured, a camera button appears. This button provides options to save an image, copy text from the image, or listen to text in the image read aloud. Google Lens is built in, so optical character recognition (OCR) is available for any text in the image. In weZoom, the captured image can also be shared with other apps, such as Google Lookout or Envision AI, to convert the image to text using OCR.
At the bottom of the Magnifier app, the Reset Zoom button appears in the center of the screen. To the left is the Settings button, which contains a variety of adjustments to fine-tune the display. These include contrast and brightness, along with a variety of color filters. Color filters include inverted, grayscale, grayscale inverted, yellow on black, black on yellow, yellow on blue, blue on yellow, white on blue, blue on white, red on black, and black on red.
Reset Zoom provides a quick way to return the view to the default settings without magnification. In the updated version of the app, this button has been replaced with Live Search, a feature that enables text in the image to be searched by typing in the desired text. If the text is present, it will be located and highlighted in the image.
When not in use, the control buttons at the bottom of the screen fade out to restore a full-screen view. A touch of the screen restores the controls. The controls in the Magnifier app, when visible, do take up more viewing area than the weZoom controls, so this is a helpful feature.
Tip: Add to Quick Tap
To make the Magnifier more convenient to open, it can be set up to open with the Quick Tap gesture, where you tap the back of the phone twice quickly. To set this up:
- Open the Settings app.
- Open System > Gestures > Quick tap.
- Turn on Use Quick tap.
- Select Open app.
- Next to “Open app,” select Settings, then choose Magnifier.
- Magnifier will now open with a double tap on the back of the phone.
Which Magnifier Is Best?
If your phone is not a Pixel 5 or newer, weZoom is the option that will run on your phone. That said, weZoom has fewer controls on the viewing area, which some users may find easier to use. Overall, Magnifier by Google packs more features, including more filters, stronger magnification, and a faster OCR experience. For weZoom users, some of this functionality can be added by installing the Google Lookout app. Both apps are free and add a powerful magnifier with plenty of features to a phone that’s probably already with you, without the need to carry a separate handheld video magnifier.