iPhone Photos Visual Look-Up Feature

iPhone Photos Visual Look Up
From laundry care instructions to recipe ideas!

If you’ve heard of Google Lens, you’ll be happy to learn that Apple has their own equivalent: Visual Look Up. This feature intelligently scans photos for subjects and look them up online. Basically, if you take a photo of a plant and want to know what it’s called, you can use Visual Look Up to identify it!

How To Do This

1. Select a photo. This can be in the photos app, Notes, Mail, and more!
2. Tap the info button. It looks like this . Note: if it doesn’t have the star in the top left, Visual Look Up isn’t available.
3. Tap the icon that appears in or below the photo. This could be a paw print icon for pets   or a leaf icon for plants 

This will show related results. For example, if you use Look Up on a photo of a cat, it will try to identify the breed and then show similar web images. Here’s an example from a photo of my lovely cat, Banjo.

Identifying Different Symbols
It’s not just pets and plants that Look Up can identify, it can also tell you what different laundry symbols mean on clothing. Click here for a short video demonstrating how this works. This is incredibly useful for clothing that doesn’t have a written description for care instructions. Additionally, sometimes the symbols can change for clothing from other countries so why memorise when Apple can decrypt these too!

Apple can also identify different symbols that a car may show on the dash, telling the user what the symbol means. If you’re new to driving, don’t have the user manual on you, or are just forgetful, this is incredibly useful for identifying the different issues your car may have. It could be as simple as the door being ajar or urgent enough to take the car to the mechanic.

Other Fun Things!

• Identifying plant species similar to how it identifies pet species
• Finding recipes – if you take a photo of a meal, Look Up will try to find recipes for similar-looking foods.
• Identifying landmarks
• Identifying and finding similar artwork
• And much more…!

So give it a try! It’ll help with both day to day life and exploring new things.