Pinterest is a place for pinned images that interested its users. With the increasing number of pins, Pinterest continues to make it easier for users to use its visual search engine.
The internet photo-sharing and publishing service adds a feature where users can zoom in on pins when using its mobile apps. Pinterest also has added an option to search for individual objects withing a pin much more obvious when users open them on web browsers without logging in, without its mobile app.
Pinterest's pinch-to-zoom is fairly standard for in the modern age of smartphones and social media. Though it also works on GIF images, the feature isn't at all groundbreaking.
However, for Pinterest, things are a bit different.
First of all, one of the reasons people use Pinterest is to search for products and ideas. For this particular reason, the feature is important because people often post photos with multiple objects in them.
With the ability to zoom in into pictures, users can see things better, especially on smartphones that have smaller screens to see what's what.
As for Pinterest itself, this will help its visual search development.
Photos with multiple objects in them give Pinterest’s computer vision technology more objects to index and more relationships among objects to recognize. This is an added context to its visual search, helping it to identify objects better.
In turn, Pinterest's visual search can do a better job in finding certain things that are similar across all other pins posted on its platform.
Initially, zooming in on a pin for users doesn't do anything beyond making it easier to see what's in an image. But Pinterest has plans to test automatically applying its visual search engine to whatever object or objects are being zoomed in on.
For example, a person could zoom in on a desk lamp in a photo and automatically be presented with pins of similar desk lamps that might even be for sale through Pinterest.
To highlights its attempt, Pinterest has also simplified the search icon to show a viewfinder and moved it from the top right corner to the bottom right corner of the pin. Pinterest said that, in testing, the new icon has increased the number of people using visual search by "nearly 70 percent."