With the advent of iOS 15, we have so many new updates to the iPhone operating system. Back in June 2021, we got a preview of iOS 15 with all its new features and improvements. Apps like FaceTime, iMessage got major updates alongside the Weather app and also the Photos App.
Photos app got new features like LiveText, Visual Lookup and so much more. Visual Lookup is an artificial intelligence-based feature that gives you more information about the image by recognizing objects from the image and then giving relevant information about it from the internet.
This is a cool feature that was implemented by Google about a couple of years ago but it’s nice to see Apple catching up to them in their own ecosystem.
What is Visual Look Up?
The Image Recognition built into the iOS operating system will give you more information about any particular image in the Photos App. The Visual Look Up also gives you information about the camera, lens, shutter speed, file size, and other information as well. You could also edit information about the image like Location, date, etc., Also, image recognition happens automatically as soon as you open it.
Once objects are identified in the image, they will show up as icons and when tapping on them would show more info about it.
The image recognition could easily recognize plants, animals, landmarks, books, music info, etc., We could boldly say that the recognition would be improving over time since it’s a matter of dataset.
How to use Visual Look Up?
Like I said earlier, this feature is exclusive to iOS 15. So, you need to download it first. As of September 2021, we have a public beta available free for all iOS users. To get that you need to sign up at beta.apple.com with your iCloud account and if you hesitate to get a beta version, you can wait till the public stable release coming probably later this month alongside the iPhone 13.
- Open the Photos app.
This feature works inside the Photos app mainly. But you could also use this from Gallery view inside the Camera app. Once you have opened the Photos app, tap on any image for which you would like to see the Visual Lookup.
- Tap on the info icon.
Once you have opened the image as you see in the image below, tap on the (i) icon at the bottom bar.
- Information about the image shows up here as you can see.
Details like what you see in the image (a dog in my case) and also details as to which camera and settings were used to shoot this image. Even file name and date details are showed here.
- You can edit the date and even add the location.
To edit the date, tap on the Adjust option at the information popup. In the calendar window that appears, choose to adjust the date and time according to your wish, and once done, tap on Submit at the top and in case if you choose to not make changes, select Revert.
- If you choose the add Location,
Tap Add Location at the bottom of the image in Step 3. In the Add Location window that appears, search for the location and tap Add at the top right corner of the window.
This is how you can use Visual Look Up in iOS 15. If the Visual Lookup automatically finds objects in the image, you would see icons over the image as you can see in the image below. Tapping on that icon would show you detailed information from Siri Knowledge or even from other sources of information like Maps, Siri Suggested Websites, Book store, etc.,
I, personally really enjoy this feature, it’s the ability for us to get closer to information than before. I can wait for Apple to really improve this feature to give us information that is readily available in almost all scenarios.
