For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a keen learner. I loved school right from first grade through nurses’ training and beyond.

In my retirement years, nothing has changed about my continual eagerness and desire to learn new things. If anything, it’s become more intense because I have more time to truly focus on whatever it is I’m researching.

One of my favourite topics is smart phone technology. I spend at least an hour each day reading about iPhone photography, tips and tricks with smart phones, photo editing, and the list goes on because the field is ever evolving and is endless.

Yesterday, I read about a little known, yet very useful feature in the iPhone photos app. I can’t tell you if android phones have this feature, but if you’re an android user, you could sure try it out to see if it’s on your phone too.

If you have an iPhone with iOS 15 or newer, and you take photos of any kind of plants (trees, grasses, flowers, really anything botanical), this is a very useful hidden feature. After you’ve taken a photo of a plant, go to your photos app on your phone. Slide up on the photo, and you’ll see an information screen. Select “look up plant” and voila! This also works for any previous plant photos in your library. Once you have the name of the plant, you can enter it in that same screen in the caption box. Very cool stuff!

I used to use a third party image lookup app, but often the process took a very long time and the results were inaccurate a lot of the time, so it caused frustration. This phone feature is easy, slick, and so far anyways, accurate in identifying the plants I’ve photographed recently.

According to “look up plant”, my feature photo is a Boxelder Maple. These grow wild alongside many of my walking paths near the river.

I wonder what today holds for learning opportunities.

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

Mahatma Gandhi