07 Mar Trying Out the New Pinterest Lens Beta

Pinterest sent out invitations last week to a select group of users to test their new Lens feature. Have you ever been out shopping or seen an item that someone is wearing and wished you had a tool that could help you identify it? With Pinterest Lens, you can snap a photo of those to-die-for heels or fabulous home accessory and Lens will hunt for similar items. In addition to finding the item for you, Lens will also make suggestions on how the item can be worn, styled, or used. For example, if your lens is pointed at a love seat, the search will show you different ways you can style your home to compliment that love seat. It will also show you different furniture pieces with similar design elements or from the same period. Once the Pinterest engineering team works out the kinks and brings Lens out of beta, this tool has endless possibilities. The invitation email looks like this. Unfortunately, it’s only for iPhone users currently, but it says Android is coming soon! To get started with Lens, click through from the email. If you don’t initially see the red camera icon appear next to the search box at the top, try logging out and back in to your Pinterest app. To activate your camera, simply click the red camera icon. Once your camera is activated, you can either take a photo or grab a photo from your device’s photo library. If you wish to take a photo, place the item within the circle that pops up and tap the screen. Our first test was this fun ruffled throw pillow. Often, Lens returns results that are, well, pretty much a dead-on match! Other times, particularly when you’re searching for an item from a saturated market, Lens doesn’t perform quite as well. For example, we tried it out with black riding boots. The boot we were searching for was neither a rain boot, nor a loafer. There were additional options if we continued scrolling that were much closer to our boots, but none were as close a match as the pillow. If you’re not satisfied with the results supplied by the initial search, click any of the colored bubbles to narrow your search. If you choose to use Lens to hunt for an item in your photo library, simply click on the image square in the upper right hand corner. Select any photo from your library and Lens will begin the search. These slingback plaid espadrilles were discovered in the wrong size on a recent shopping trip. We thought we’d really put Lens to the test and see if it could locate them for us. Unfortunately, the results weren’t very helpful. (Prada’s woven leather sandals are beautiful, but a little out of budget!) Thankfully, we know the brand, so we’ll just go hunt for them on our own. Once Pinterest fine tunes this tool, we see it being great for finding that must-have item you spot while out and about. The one feature we were surprised to see left out of this major upgrade is the ability to add pins to your existing boards from your camera or photo library. This seems like a no-brainer to us! If Pinterest is going to integrate the camera to their app, why not allow you to pin the photos you take? That’s new content, people! Hopefully this functionality will be added before the feature reaches wide release. Pinterest Lens is a stellar addition to the Pinterest app. While there are still a few glitches to work out, most users will agree that it’s an awesome concept. It will be interesting to see if Pinterest can correct the hiccups and take advantage of all the user opportunities that camera integration brings to their platform. Let’s see it, Pinterest!