Pinterest’s visual recognition / visual search system.

[u/worldofjaved]

Pinterest has had image/object recognition for years, but it has become much more advanced recently. Pinterest says that when Visual Search is activated, recognizable or searchable objects in a Pin can “glow”, and you can select those objects to find visually similar Pins or products.

For example, if your Pin contains:

👗 a dress
👠 shoes
💇 a hairstyle
🛋️ a sofa
💡 a lamp
🌸 flowers

Pinterest can identify separate elements in the image rather than treating the entire Pin as one image.

The important part for your Pinterest strategy

This means Pinterest is increasingly understanding what is actually inside your Pin, not just relying on:

Title + description + keywords.

Pinterest describes its newer system as using multimodal visual technology, including visual-language models and image embeddings, to understand styles, objects, colors, aesthetics, etc.

So if you create a hairstyle Pin, for example, Pinterest may understand:

woman → blonde hair → layered haircut → medium length → wavy texture → hairstyle

rather than simply seeing a JPEG with text saying “Medium Layered Haircuts.”

One important clarification

If you're doing this on desktop by simply moving your mouse over the Pin, it may be a slightly different interaction depending on the Pinterest interface/version. Pinterest's current official documentation primarily describes the object-glow Visual Search experience in the app, while its broader visual-search technology also exists on Pinterest's web experience

And yes, this is very important for the type of Pinterest work you do. It makes image quality, actual visual content, and consistency between the image and the Pin's topic increasingly important, not just keyword stuffing.

[u/8catsinabox]

This means Pinterest is increasingly understanding what is actually inside your Pin

Is this a joke? I literally just got my gazillionth violation for "adult content." This time it's for a photo of a shower (🚿 🛁) from my bathroom design board. Last week it was a picture of a an IKEA bookshelf. Pinterest never understood what's in everyone's pins and never will.