When Apple released iOS 15 in 2021, the updated software included a new feature in Photos called Visual Look Up. This neat AI-powered tool can recognize animals, plants, and landmarks in your photos, and provide information about them when tapped.
Here’s how it works: When you open an image of greenery in Photos, for example, you’ll notice a few little stars next to the info icon in the bottom bar, which means iOS has spotted something it’s looking for. recognize. Tap the icon and you’ll quickly be told that the nearest tree is probably a European Ash. Very practical, although in a relatively small number of spheres.
Foundry
But two years later, Apple is expanding the usefulness of this previously niche feature. iOS 17 and iPadOS 17, which were demoed at WWDC this month and will be widely available in the fall of this year, upgrade Visual Look Up to add the ability to recognize different types of food and, perhaps most useful of all, symbols.
These upgrades were revealed at WWDC (these are mentioned in our iPadOS 17 review from the same day), but beta testers are only just getting to grips with them. And it’s fair to say they’re impressed.
Writing on Mastodon on Wednesday, MacStories’ Federico Viticci praised iOS 17’s performance in interpreting laundry tags: “iOS 17’s Photos app can now identify And explain laundry symbols in pictures and it’s amazing,” he wrote. “We need to take back everything we said about Apple not doing machine learning properly.” (For what it’s worth, not all of us have criticized Apple’s machine learning efforts.)
Laundry tags are difficult for humans, being small, often discolored, and cryptically or even counter-intuitive in design. But they’re the perfect use case for computer AI, being largely consistent within tight visual settings and essentially relying on simply memorizing what each one means; there is very little room for subjective interpretation. And as a result, Visual Look Up happily tells Viticci that the offered garment should not be tumble dried (too late, apparently) or dry cleaned.
MacRumors has done its own additional testing and further notes that you can click on the information provided to find out where it came from. Laundry guidelines ultimately come, the site reports, from the International Organization for Standardization.
The feature, according to MacRumors, is already reliable at this stage of beta testing, appearing to successfully identify every laundry symbol the site has tried, although it notes that the images had to be zoomed in far enough for Visual Look Up to work. And the feature can also recognize symbols on car dashboards, MacRumors found. It’s an upgrade that wasn’t mentioned during the keynote.
While Laundry Tags might be a small upgrade, it’s a testament to the kind of work Apple is putting into Visual Look Up to make it a feature we’ll all be using more often. And of course, it’s a feature that could be a key part of the Vision Pro headset once it becomes a device meant to be worn outdoors.
For more information on new features coming to an iPhone near you, check out our full guide to iOS 17.