Skip to content Skip to footer

15+ Amazing Travel Tricks Your iPhone Can Already Do for Free, From Translation to Flight Status to Measuring Bags



You can use the iPhone’s ability to understand what’s depicted in images to help clarify and organize your memories of your vacations.

For example, if you took a picture of a major landmark as you fly by in a taxi but you don’t remember or know what it was called, you can often find the answer right in your Photos app. 

Select an image, as we did with this shot of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Then slide the photo up or tap the lowercase I on the bottom of the screen. This brings up an info page with lots of facts about that image, including when and where it was taken. 

If the subject of the photo begins to shimmer with an animated white glow, as the Cathedral is starting to do in the image that’s above left, then you can tap that item to pull up another mini-menu. Choose Look Up from that menu, or, if you see the option, tap Look Up Landmark. That takes you to a result that looks like the middle image, above. In this case, the iPhone figured out that it’s St Paul’s Cathedral, shows you where it’s located on a map, and it even adds more links to more information and images for it. 

For things that your iPhone can’t easily identify, like the delicious burrata dish at London’s Dovetale restaurant in the third image above, iPhone also gives you the little-known ability to write your own captions for any shot you take.

On the same info page that pops up when you tap the lowercase I, you’ll find a blank line under the image. There, you can simply enter a caption of your own. Whatever you enter will be searchable from Photos’ magnifying glass, too.

You can categorize every photo from your trip this way, and you don’t need to forget the name of the things you photograph ever again.