Your iPhone can help to decipher those crazy laundry symbols on your clothes, but if you didn’t know that, you’re certainly not alone.
Anyone who has ever done laundry in their lifetime has undoubtedly looked at the back of a clothing tag and seen a variety of symbols, some of which may seem sort obvious, while other symbols look like some convergence of hieroglyphics and greek. But, your iPhone has a great built-in feature that will translate those laundry symbols, helping you to make sense of what you’re supposed to do with your clothing, towels, sheets, and whatever other laundry you’re doing.
How to Identify & Translate Laundry Symbols with iPhone
- Take a picture of the laundry tag symbols with your iPhone, make sure the laundry symbols are visible clearly and the photo is not blurry
- Open the Photos app and go to the picture you just took of the laundry symbols
- Tap on the picture and look for the (i) info button that looks like an ‘I’ with a circle around it to access Visual Look Up
- Tap “Look Up Laundry Care”
- You’ll see a translation of what the laundry symbols mean, directly on your iPhone in the Photos app
And there you go, now you have a better idea of how to do your laundry, thanks to iPhone.
As you can see in this example, several of the laundry symbols from the photo are identified and defined.
Curiously, some of the laundry symbols were skipped. So for this particular example with the iPhone Visual Lookup feature and my laundry, it’ll remain a mystery for the entire world what the concentric pyramid, circle with an x through it, and box with a circle in it means (though I’m going to assume that symbol means machine washing is fine, but maybe not and that’s why I keep shrinking many of my t-shirts). You can always tap the ‘report an issue’ button if you run into this yourself on your iPhone, which will let you submit a report to Apple about this feature (or similar with Visual Lookup).
This feature was introduced in iOS 17 for iPhone, so if you’re not running iOS 17 or newer on your iPhone you will not have this particular Visual Lookup capability on your device.
Try this out yourself, it’s just one of the many great little subtle features on iPhone, many of which users would never know about unless they are shown.
The Visual Lookup feature has a lot of other nifty tricks up its leave too, and you can use the same feature to identify flowers, plants, and objects using your iPhone camera and photos of those things.
