Searching for photos on Facebook has just gotten a whole lot easier. The social networking company recently updated its search engine, allowing it to recognise the content inside a photo. This means that even if you did not tag or describe the pictures you uploaded into the platform, Facebook will still be able to recognise what you posted.
All you need to do is perform a regular search like “photos of pizza” or “black shirt photos”, and Facebook will show you relevant results even if the photo wasn’t tagged with that information. This is similar to what Google Photos or Photos on iOS 10, whereby they are able to recognise and group your pictures based on their content.
This is made possible by Lumos, a platform by Facebook that is built for image and video understanding. It is trained to identify objects using tens of million of photos with proper descriptions, so it can recognise scenes, objects, animals, places, attractions and clothing items. According to TechCrunch, Facebook will also be applying this to help you search for things inside a video.
Sadly though, it looks like the new image search feature is not available for us just yet. I tried to look for “photos of pizza”, and all the photo results I get have the text “pizza” written in the description.
Check out Facebook to find out more about its new photo search feature.
(Source: Facebook via: The Verge, TechCrunch)
