Searching with images is the wave of the future. Whether you're trying to identify something you'd like to buy, checking for deals or looking for information on what you see in the world around you, visual search apps can help. Armed with a smartphone and one of these apps, all you have to do is snap a photo and the app will try to identify the object or landmark and find information on it.

Ready to get started? Here are our favorite visual search apps.

Best App for Searching for Anything and Everything: Google Lens

With Google Lens, all you have to do is point and shoot at any object, and Google Lens does a pretty good job of telling you what it is. I took a picture of a flowering plant I'm growing on my terrance and and found it's an Alyssum. The camera also recognized a church I visited earlier this year in Oaxaca, Mexico and did a nice job of translating Spanish into English in real time of everything from signs to menus. You can also snap pictures of clothing and other objects and find similar items for purchase. It’s a great app if you want to learn about whatever you’re looking at (or if you've forgotten the name of something and really want to remember it).

You can access Google Lens through the Google: Search, Discover, News app or Google Photos app for iPhone users and through the Google Camera app and Google Photos app for Android. You can easily analyze photos or screenshots you've taken or analyze an image in real time.

Price: Free for iOS and Google Play

Best App for Searching for Hard-to-Find Items: Ebay

See the perfect pair of shoes, an old-fashioned truck or vase? You can use an image to find it, or something similar, on Ebay. Image search is an option in the standard search box, allowing you to snap a photo or select a photo from your camera roll to search. eBay will sift through over a billion items to find similar products — though just how similar will depend on the photo and the item. A search for a pair of shoes, for example, will give you shoes with a similar style, but may not necessarily be the same shoes.

Price: free for iOS and Google Play

Best app for all kinds of shopping: Amazon Mobile

If shopping is what you're interested in, Amazon Mobile makes it easy for you to find anything they stock using your smartphone camera.

Just fire up your Amazon app and click on the camera next to the search bar. The camera then turns on and little dots will try to find the outlines of what you’re taking a picture of, then offer suggestions. There is also a fashion specific search option, called StyleSnap. You can pull in a photo from your phone's camera roll (select upload photo) or turn on "Select recent screenshots" for easy access to looks you've saved while browsing (the yellow dress is from a story that Elle did on summer fashion finds). Sometimes, Amazon doesn’t recognize the object itself and asks if you want to search for the category it thinks the item is; for example, I pointed the camera to my UE Boom Speaker, and while it didn’t recognize that it was the UE Boom, it did recognize I was pointing my camera at a speaker.

If you want to shop on Amazon, this is the perfect helper. 

Price: Free for iOS and Google Play

Best for house hunting: Realtor.com

Looking for the perfect home? Realtor.com is the app for you. If you see a property you like while you're driving around looking at neighborhoods, take a photo of the for-sale sign using the Realtor.com app to pull up the home's complete real estate listing.

You'll get easy access to the property's full details plus photos, all without having to get out of your car to grab a flyer.

Price: Free for iOS and Google Play

Best App for Searching for Deals: Snipsnap

If you are a couponer, chances are you’re pretty strategic about where you buy; after all, the fun is in the search for the lowest price! Snipsnap is perfect for that — just take a photo of any paper coupon and the app will turn it into a mobile offer to be scanned. Even better, if you take a photo of a product, the app will recognize it, then find the prices of it from huge databases of stores and coupons. You’ll always get the best price.

Price: Free on iOS and Google Play

Best App for Pinners: Pinterest

That’s right, if you can pin it, you can find it (well, at least a close approximation of it from other pins). Pinterest's visual search tool is really easy to use. Just click on the pin with the item you fancy, then tap the search icon in the corner. You can then adjust the box that appears to only search for what’s in it. Pinterest then gives you a set of pins that look similar to the image you selected so you can hopefully find where to get the item. Now that you know about this feature, we can guarantee you’ll be using it all the time.

Price: Free on iOS and Google Play

This post was updated on 6/10/2019

[woman with smartphone camera image via BigStockPhoto; Other images via Google, Snipsnap, Realtor.com, Ebay and Pinterest]