lyoshaa wrote:
I live in Europe and I have an iPhone 13 with iOS 17.4 installed. I have English as system language on my phone. I want to use the Visual Look Up feature to find plant information from photos, but I just don't have the Look Up feature on any of my photos. I've taken pictures with my iPhone camera, I've downloaded 4K photos from the internet - my iPhone just won't show me the feature.
I searched on Reddit, and found out that I'm not the only one with this problem. People wrote that it's because of region: in the US the feature works, but in other countries it doesn't. What's the point of blocking such a harmless feature for other regions? I just want to find out information about plants by photo. How do I enable this feature in unsupported regions? Thanks.
You assume that Apple is "blocking" some "harmless feature" that would automatically work everywhere in the world, otherwise.
Have you considered the possibility that to make this feature have any possibility of working at all, it might be necessary to train an artificial intelligence program (deep neural network) against a very large database of real examples? Maybe Apple or its suppliers have only done this training or compiled these databases and neural network models for certain areas.
The job of identifying plants (and animals) from pictures is a complex one:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10659151/
"How many species exist on Earth? Projections range from millions to trillions. A 2011 paper in PLOS Biology provided a comprehensive estimate of 9 million."
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/biodiversity/#
"Scientists have estimated that there are around 8.7 million species of plants and animals in existence. However, only around 1.2 million species have been identified and described so far, most of which are insects."
It appears that Visual Look Up is currently available for the English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish languages. I don't see a listing of available regions.
Use Visual Look Up to identify objects in your photos and videos on iPhone - Apple Support
iOS and iPadOS - Feature Availability - Apple
