Search by Image: Upload a Photo, Search Your Index With It

September 1, 2026 · Search · New Feature · All updates

You can now search with a picture. Click the image icon next to the search box on any Opensolr hosted search page, pick a photo, and the results come back for what is in it. Nothing to set up, nothing to add to your index, nothing to re-crawl.

01 Eight real searches

These are screenshots of the feature running on live customer indexes, not mock-ups. A photo of two huskies against a jewellery catalogue. The same lily photo against three completely different indexes. An English supplement label against a Romanian shop.

Read the endpoint documentation

02 Photo in, results out

You hand it a picture. Opensolr works out what is in it. Your search runs, and the right things come back. That is the whole story.

Three steps, and you only do the first one.

It works on any index, and it crosses languages: a photo taken in one country finds products described in another, as the sixth screenshot above shows.

03 On your hosted search page

An image icon, left of the search box. Hovering it says Search with a photo; clicking it opens your pictures. On a phone that is your camera.
You see your photo, not a list of words. A small thumbnail of the picture sits where the query would be, so you always know which image the results belong to. Hover enlarges it, clicking opens it full size.
The link behaves like any other search. Refresh it, filter it, change the language, send it to someone — it works exactly like a search you typed.
You can see what it recognised. The words appear above the results and each one is clickable, which is handy when the photo was ambiguous and you want to narrow it down.
Typing takes over. Start typing in the box and you are back to an ordinary text search.

04 From your own code

Building your own front end? The same thing is one API call: send the picture, get back the words, run whichever search you already call. It counts as one AI request against your monthly quota, exactly like embed — see pricing page, and the full endpoint reference for parameters and examples.

05 Your picture

Anything a phone takes, up to 10 MB. JPEG, PNG, WEBP, GIF, BMP, TIFF, HEIC and AVIF — Apple’s format included.
It is not stored. The picture is looked at and thrown away; the preview you see afterwards expires on its own.
Location data goes with it. Any GPS coordinates the camera wrote into the file are dropped before anything else happens.

See it on your search page API documentation