Having a camera on your phone opens up a world of possibilities. The iPhone can identify objects from your photos, saving you the hassle of looking things up yourself. It’s a pretty cool trick to know.

iOS 15 introduced a feature in the Photos app called “Visual Lookup.” After you take a photo, the app can identify various objects. You don’t have to do anything special, it just happens.

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If you haven’t taken a photo of the object yet, do that first. Then, open the “Photos” app on your iPhone.

Open the "Photos" app.

Select a photo that contains something you’d like to identify.

Select a photo.

If you see a little star on the “i” information icon, that means Photos has identified something in the photo. Tap the “i” icon.

You’ll see another little icon on top of the photo, indicating what has been identified. You can tap that to open up search results.

You’ll now see some results from Siri.

Siri results.

That’s all there is to it! This doesn’t work for every single photo, it just depends on whether the Photos app identifies something in the photo or not. There’s no way to manually force it to scan a photo. Still, it’s handy when it works.

RELATED: How to Stop Apple from Scanning Your iPhone Photos

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Joe Fedewa is a Staff Writer at How-To Geek. He has been covering consumer technology for over a decade and previously worked as Managing Editor at XDA-Developers. Joe loves all things technology and is also an avid DIYer at heart. He has written thousands of articles, hundreds of tutorials, and dozens of reviews.
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