Pinterest announced a collection of new tools on Tuesday that aim to make shopping on the site easier, including the addition of visual search tech that lets you shop online for products you discovered offline, with the help of your camera.  The company announced the new suite of tools, dubbed “Shopping with Pinterest,” at an event held at its company headquarters in San Francisco.  The biggest piece of news from the event is one that isn't quite live yet. In the months ahead, users will have the ability to take a photo of an object in the real world — or say, a scene (like the decor of a cute cabin you stayed at over the weekend) — and Pinterest will push out related recommendations based on the style. Mashable got a sneak preview of the feature (captured in the Vine below) and offline-to-online detection was smooth and took less than four seconds.  The company also showed off a new automatic object detection feature on iOS that allows users to find products within a pin. For example, if you're looking at a pin of a woman wearing a bracelet, bag and pants, you can tap the visual search icon located at the top of the pin. This will put tiny dots on each item that can reveal more information about each product.  "Since an image can contain dozens of objects, we wanted to make it as simple as possible to start a discovery experience from any of them," the company said on its engineering blog. "In the same way auto-complete improves the experience of text search, automatic object detection makes visual search a more seamless experience. Object detection in visual search also enables enable new features, like object-to-object matching."  The move is a part of a greater effort to turn the photo-rich site into an e-commerce platform and make it easier for users to find products they like.  “People are looking for ideas [on Pinterest]; they’re not looking for news or pictures of friends or family,” a company spokesperson told attendees, adding about 55% of Pinterest users consider it a place to shop.  Last year, the company added buyable pins to its mobile platform — allowing users to make product purchases directly from the site — but Pinterest announced the feature will now be available on the web version, as well.  Pinterest is also adding a shopping bag that follows you from page to page (accessible both on mobile or a laptop) and better viewing tools that show products at different angles. Shoppers will also be able to find new products on new merchant profiles (seen above); these pages show what's new, what's popular and what's on sale.  The company said it continues to work hard on building deeper learning algorithms, especially around the camera, to bridge the gap between offline and online shopping.  Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
Pinterest wants to be synonymous with shopping and its building high-tech tools centered around the camera to help.