ID plants straight from your iPhone camera roll, no software needed

[RosemaryDW]

If you've got a newish iPhone it likely has a feature that will identify plants directly from any photo you take or download: visual lookup. It's quite reliable for me and very simple. Here is the brief tutorial: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/visual-identify-objects-photos-iph21c29a1cf/ios.

Snap photo, click the info icon that appears at the top of the screen, tap on the top plant result. Boom! Impressed a friend by identifying New Zealand Flax earlier today.

 

[SinLA]

You do need to have the latest iPhone for that though. I have a 12 and it doesn’t work…

 

[RosemaryDW]

Hmm, I am no kind of expert but according to Apple, it should. Here is the list of supported models, straight from the Apple website, it goes as far back as the 11. Click on the supported models link:

Use Visual Look Up to identify objects in your photos and videos on iPhone

Use Visual Look Up in the Photos app to identify popular landmarks, art, statues, plants, pets, birds, insects, and spiders that appear in your photos and videos on iPhone.

support.apple.com

You do need to enable it, the last step in this troubleshooting guide might help. You can check the other steps as well, they just seem like standard suggestions to me: https://www.guidingtech.com/best-ways-to-fix-visual-look-up-not-working-on-iphone/.

It also can't do much with an image that has multiple plants in it or is otherwise messy/blurry.

My phone is the cheapest they sell but it is bit newer than the 12. Again, I'm no expert but hope it's a simple issue of changing a setting.

It does animals too!

 

[Maddoggy]

I have a plant ID called "Picture This". The first year is free but after that its 2.99 a month. I use it exclusively for finding plants that could be harmful to my two subadult sulcatas.

 

[RosemaryDW]

I have a plant ID called "Picture This". The first year is free but after that its 2.99 a month. I use it exclusively for finding plants that could be harmful to my two subadult sulcatas.

The iOS feature is able to identify far more plants than anything I've ever used. Collective power of the internet, I suppose. We were in another country/continent last month and I think we had only one fail, off a bad photo.

There is a downside, and it's that I insisted to my husband--who doesn't know anything about plants--it was too good to be true. He wins this round.