Did you know your iPhone has a built-in ability to identify many common flowers, plants, and objects?
Thanks to Siri Knowledge, your iPhone camera can easily identify a surprising amount of plants, flowers, items, and other objects that you point the camera to and snap a picture of, but most people don’t know about this hidden feature.
Grab your iPhone, go find a flower or plant somewhere, and let’s walk through how this cool feature works.
+54
I was going to say that this sounds great and would be useful for me (IF I had an iPhone) but then I saw it identifies just the common ones, that is a pity. My memory is not like it used to be for plant names.
+4
Never knew this one. Just tried it out on my photos and it works. Pretty cool
+25
I was not aware of this feature either. Thanks for sharing that.
It appears to use reverse image search to identify the plant, so NOT just limited to common plants.
For people who want to identify more kinds of plants, there are a few api on the iTunes Store that will do that. I do not think they are free anymore however.
+4
What a lovely feature!
+25
So after reviewing this feature, it appears this does a reverse photo search. So not just flowers and plants, but a number of other things as well. Animals and birds seem to work., as do some landmarks. For example, it recognized inside the Oakland Coliseum.
+4
Oooh. I’ll try that out on other stuff!
+25
You can tell when it can try (it’s not always correct, listing a black squirrel as a cat!) as the little info circle icon at the bottom gets those little stars next to it.
You can tell when it can try (it’s not always correct, listing a black squirrel as a cat!)
+4
Ha ha. Just went though my photos and there’s a photo of a lion at the zoo and it classed it as a dog! ‘Irish terrier’ apparently !
+54
You can tell when it can try (it’s not always correct, listing a black squirrel as a cat!) as the little info circle icon at the bottom gets those little stars next to it.
This is what I was wondering with the plant side of it. For my job if I need to identify a particular cultivar of a plant, just how accurate is it? Personally I would not trust it to be that accurate, but to get to the correct genera and right species, I would trust it more with that.
+6
This sounds a lot like Google Lens on the Android side. Maybe slightly more accurate based on the comments here. lol. Still wouldn’t bet my life on the results, though.
Does the iOS version do language translation, too? That is a very handy feature on Google Lens.
+4
It’s not that great. I certainly wouldn’t trust it. Shame as it could be really useful
+25
It’s not that great. I certainly wouldn’t trust it. Shame as it could be really useful
I agree. It gets close but not exact, rspecially on plants. Some of the paid apps tend to work better. Been a while since I used them. Used to be free but started charging monthly, so deleted them. Probably worth an App Store search to see what people like. I think I had “Picture This” before.
+6
Speaking from the Android side, maybe Google Lens is better. It would make sense with search being Google’s forte. I would be interested in a side-by-side comparison. Would Google Lens give the same inaccurate result for MajorHavoc’s squirrel/cat or Russell’s lion/dog?
We just visited Gatorland on vacation in FL and it accurately identified Alligators, snakes, herons, egrets, and a few other bird species accurately. There was a little confusion on whether the flamingos were Chilean or American. But honestly I can’t tell the difference between the two either. lol.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, but for a reverse-search tool, it does pretty good.
+4
Sounds much better than the iPhone one then!
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