Google’s new Chrome extension lets you save web pages and images for later

If you’re like me, you save a bunch of web pages for later with software like Save to Pocket but never get to them. You occasionally remember to look at the sad, enormous pile of web content that you gathered over the years — most of it now completely foreign to you — but you can never force yourself to just delete it all.

For those that do find saving stuff for later useful, you might want to look at a new Chrome extension from Google, called Save to Google.

It’s extremely simple to use: You install the extension, and a new button will show up in your Chrome toolbar. Click it while visiting a webpage, and it will be saved in Google’s cloud — to find your saved web page, go to www.google.com/save/.

It doesn’t appear to save the full contents of a web page though; it’s basically a searchable list of bookmarks which you can tag for easier management.

The extension joins forces with a different, little known Google feature, which lets you save images you find on Google Image Search to that same location. To do that, go toimages.google.com on your mobile, perform a search, tap on an image, and then tap on “Save” in the lower right corner. The image will be saved to www.google.com/save as well.

The Save to Google extension should not be confused with another, similar extension calledSave to Google Drive. Also made by Google, and it lets you actually send copies of entire web pages (instead of just bookmarks) to your Google Drive.

Put all these together, and you get a pretty confusing situation. Some important features that exist in Save to Google Drive, like a right-click contextual menu, are absent in Save to Google. And the image search saving feature — at least for me — only works on mobile, and not on desktop.

While it’s always nice to have free extensions that don’t even use your storage space, it wouldn’t hurt if Google consolidated all this into one, full-featured piece of software.