Your iPhone camera can identify plants and flowers – here’s how

There are so many exciting iPhone tricks to discover once you start getting familiar with Apple’s handset. And most of them are built into the operating system, so you don’t need to download an app to take advantage of them. One iPhone trick you may not be aware of is using the camera to identify plants and flowers: it’s called Visual Look Up.

It also works for other objects in your photos and screenshots. In what follows, we’ll tell you how it all works and how you can use it on your iPhone.

Visual Look Up is a feature Apple introduced in iOS 15 last year. It uses Siri Knowledge to recognize objects in photos and give more details about them. MacRumors emphasizes the plant and flower recognition function, but the same engine can also identify animals, tourist sites, books and art.

Identify plants and flowers with your iPhone camera

The principle is the same whether it is a plant and flower or any other object you are trying to identify. In any case, it all starts with taking a picture of the target. Or with a screenshot of an image containing the object you want to identify.

Once the iPhone has saved the image, you can go to the photos app to try to identify the object.

Open the image you just created/save and look for the “i” symbol in the bottom menu. If the button has a star in the left corner means that the iPhone has been able to identify the plant or flower.

Then tap the button to display the results. Another option is to swipe up on the photo and the same results will appear.

Finally, there is one more thing you need to do. A icon appears on top of the target object. You are looking for a leaf for plants and flowers. Tap it and the iPhone will open the Siri Knowledge panel that will help you identify the object.

The icon has a different symbol depending on the object, as shown in the images above.

Visual Look Up doesn’t always work

Unlike most of the hidden iPhone features that we highlight in our guides, the iPhone’s Visual Look Up trick may not always work. As you can see above, the handset needs to recognize the object in the photo to open the Siri Knowledge panel.

You may want to take additional photos of the target if you failed on the first try. But before you start using iPhone to identify plants, flowers, and dog breeds, make sure your hardware supports this feature.

You need an iPhone with an A12 Bionic chip or better for Visual Look Up to work. That means devices older than iPhone XR, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max cannot identify objects despite iOS 15.

In addition, the Visual Look Up feature is only available in the following languages ​​and markets: English (Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, UK, US), French (France), German (Germany), Italian (Italy), and Spanish (Mexico, Spain, USA).

For iPad, you need at least an iPad Air 3, iPad 8 or iPad mini 5 to perform Visual Look Ups.

This Apple support document should provide additional help for using Visual Look Up.

---

More Apple Coverage: For more Apple news, visit our iPhone 14 guide.