OtherConsumer FacingVerified

Reviewed and published by trentmaziarz, March 23, 2026. Discovered and drafted by our automated research pipeline.

Pinterest offers Lens, a camera feature inside the Pinterest app that lets any user point their phone at a real-world object and find visually similar Pins and shoppable products. The feature launched in beta in February 2017 and was upgraded in May 2025 to support multimodal search, powered by visual language models, initially for women's fashion in the US, Canada, and the UK. The system can identify approximately 2.5 billion objects across home and fashion and handles hundreds of millions of visual searches each month.

Details

Pinterest Lens uses deep convolutional neural networks trained on Pinterest's image corpus to identify objects, their attributes, and their visual style. The May 2025 update added visual language models (VLMs), a form of generative AI, enabling the system to process combined text-and-image queries; for example, a user can tap a Pin and add a text keyword such as a color or style to narrow results. An animated glow feature, initially available for women's fashion in the US, Canada, and the UK, uses VLMs to generate descriptive words that help users identify what they like about a particular Pin. A separate Shop the Look feature uses the same computer vision infrastructure to identify and link individual shoppable items within a single lifestyle photograph.

Products affected

Pinterest mobile app (camera search)Pinterest searchPinterest shopping (Product Pins/Shop the Look)

Sources & Evidence

News Article

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pinterest-updates-visual-search-more-140635468.html

News Article

https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/building-pinterest-lens-a-real-world-visual-discovery-system-59812d8cbfbc

News Article

https://help.pinterest.com/en/article/pinterest-lens

News Article

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/pinterest-rolls-out-pinterest-lens-all-us-users-adds-new-options

News Article

https://venturebeat.com/social/pinterest-launches-lens-visual-search-in-beta-on-android-and-ios-in-the-u-s/

News Article

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/02/08/pinterest-launches-lens-visual-search-tool/

News Article

https://newsroom-archive.pinterest.com/upgrading-lens-for-more-online-to-offline-inspiration

News Article

https://business.pinterest.com/blog/the-future-of-search-is-visual/

News Article

Pinterest updates visual search with more AI-powered features

TechCrunch·May 2025

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/05/pinterest-updates-visual-search-with-more-ai-powered-features/

Company Disclosure

Company DisclosureVerified

How Pinterest pushes boundaries of AI-powered discovery using AWS

AWS

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/pinterest-ai-case-study/

Cite this record

Trace Foundation. (2026). Pinterest: Pinterest offers Lens, a camera feature inside the Pinterest app that lets any user point their phone at a real-world object and find visually similar Pins and shoppable products. The feature launched in beta in February 2017 and was upgraded in May 2025 to support multimodal search, powered by visual language models, initially for women's fashion in the US, Canada, and the UK. The system can identify approximately 2.5 billion objects across home and fashion and handles hundreds of millions of visual searches each month (data as of 2026-06-06) [Data set record]. AI Trace. https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/5a1e14ac-9ec0-4352-b9f5-f4799a1b5ca4. Accessed October 15, 2026.

Stable link: https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/5a1e14ac-9ec0-4352-b9f5-f4799a1b5ca4
Data as of: June 6, 2026
Last verified: March 23, 2026

How to cite AI Trace

Other practices by Pinterest

OtherPinterest maintains an internal program called Responsible AI that covers three areas: building inclusive AI features (the skin tone, body type, and hair pattern tools described in Practice 21), testing its AI systems for unfair bias (using internal tools that measure whether models perform equally well across different groups of users), and developing guidelines for the safe use of generative AI. The program includes red teaming — structured attempts to find flaws or harmful outputs in AI systems before they launch.OtherPinterest is testing AI-powered upgrades to its Boards feature that go beyond simple user-organized collections. In October 2025, Pinterest launched an experiment in the U.S. and Canada where the platform automatically generates outfit ideas from a user's saved fashion Pins ("Styled for you"), creates entirely AI-curated boards based on trending styles ("Boards made for you"), and suggests related products based on what a user has already saved ("Make It Yours").OtherPinterest uses AI to identify diverse skin tones, body types, and hair patterns across billions of images on its platform, then uses those signals to ensure that search results and recommendations reflect a broader range of human appearances. Users can filter fashion search results by body type ranges, skin tone ranges, and hair patterns. The body type technology launched in September 2023, with public user filters rolling out in March 2024; skin tone ranges have been available since 2018.

Have evidence about Pinterest's AI practices? Submit a report.

Report a Sighting →