I’m sure there have been times when you’ve texted your mom to ask how to wash your favorite sweater the best way. Or you asked your dad to help you figure out what that annoying light on your dashboard means. I agree that “adulting” can be tough at times, but now your iPhone can help you out when things go wrong at home.
Visual Look Up is an iOS tool that works like Google Lens and is used after the fact to help you identify things in photos. It came out with iOS 15 and could recognize things like animals, paintings, books, and locations at first.
But as of iOS 17, Visual Look Up can now read laundry tags and dashboard icons. This makes it a much more useful tool for dealing with the problems that come up in daily life. So, this piece shows you how to use Visual Look Up on an iPhone .
What You Need and the Tools
As long as it has iOS 17, an iPhone
Visual Look Up: How to Use It
Open a picture in a big window.
Click on the button with three stars.
Click on Look Up
How to do it step by step
- Make sure iOS 17 is installed on your iPhone.
Making sure your iPhone has iOS 17 is the first thing you need to do to use the best version of Visual Look Up, which can read things like laundry tags and dashboard symbols. To do this, go to Settings, then General, and finally Software Update. If you haven’t already, here’s how to get iOS 17.
- You can open a picture in full screen or pause a movie in any frame.
Click on the picture to see a bigger version of Visual Look Up.
Choose the picture that has the thing you want to see and open it in full screen mode. You can stop videos at any point. It means that Visual Look Up is available for that picture if the Info button (to the left of the Delete button) shows a star icon, like “Detected Dog” or “Detected Laundry.”
- Press the button with three dots next to it, then press Look Up Visual
To see the Visual Look Up results, tap the photo’s information button with the star, then tap Look Up at the top of the page. For example, Look Up Dog tells you what kind of dog the four-legged person in the picture might be, and Look Up Laundry Care tells you what each laundry symbol in the picture means.
More information
Apple’s Visual Look Up tool isn’t available everywhere or in every language. At the moment, only countries that know English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, or Spanish can use it.
It goes without saying that Visual Look Up won’t work on all images, since not all of them have an object or theme that is easy to find. When Visual Look Up isn’t possible for a picture, the Info button is shown without any stars or other symbols.
On top of that, Visual Look Up isn’t always right. Visual Look Up mistakenly called Sushi, a Maltese Poodle, either a Havanese or a Bearded Collie.
Along with adding the ability to recognize laundry tags and panel icons, iOS 17 also changes the way the feature looks. Visual Lookup changes the “i” symbol in eligible pictures into a plant, dog, laundry basket, or monument, based on what it sees. In the iOS 15 and 16 versions of Visual Lookup, on the other hand, the feature can be found by its stars alone.