Detect labels in an image by using the Cloud Vision API

This quickstart shows you how to:

  • Create a Cloud Storage bucket.
  • Upload your image to Cloud Storage and make the file publicly accessible.
  • Make a request to the Vision API with that image.

These steps should take about five minutes to complete. You can store up to 5 GB of data in Cloud Storage for no charge and make up to 1000 feature requests per month to the Vision API for no charge.

Before you begin

If you haven't done so already, use the following instructions to set up your project and create a Cloud Storage bucket.

Set up your project

  1. Sign in to your Google Cloud account. If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

  2. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

    Roles required to select or create a project

    • Select a project: Selecting a project doesn't require a specific IAM role—you can select any project that you've been granted a role on.
    • Create a project: To create a project, you need the Project Creator (roles/resourcemanager.projectCreator), which contains the resourcemanager.projects.create permission. Learn how to grant roles.

    Go to project selector

  3. Verify that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

  4. Enable the Cloud Vision API.

    Roles required to enable APIs

    To enable APIs, you need the Service Usage Admin IAM role (roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageAdmin), which contains the serviceusage.services.enable permission. Learn how to grant roles.

    Enable the API

  5. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

    Roles required to select or create a project

    • Select a project: Selecting a project doesn't require a specific IAM role—you can select any project that you've been granted a role on.
    • Create a project: To create a project, you need the Project Creator (roles/resourcemanager.projectCreator), which contains the resourcemanager.projects.create permission. Learn how to grant roles.

    Go to project selector

  6. Verify that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

  7. Enable the Cloud Vision API.

    Roles required to enable APIs

    To enable APIs, you need the Service Usage Admin IAM role (roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageAdmin), which contains the serviceusage.services.enable permission. Learn how to grant roles.

    Enable the API

    8.

Create a Cloud Storage bucket

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Cloud Storage Buckets page.

    Go to Buckets

  2. Click Create.
  3. On the Create a bucket page, enter your bucket information. To go to the next step, click Continue.
    1. For Name your bucket, enter a unique bucket name. Don't include sensitive information in the bucket name, because the bucket namespace is global and publicly visible.
    2. In the Choose where to store your data section, do the following:
      1. Select a Location type.
      2. Choose a location where your bucket's data is permanently stored from the Location type drop-down menu.
      3. To set up cross-bucket replication, select Add cross-bucket replication via Storage Transfer Service and follow these steps:

        Set up cross-bucket replication

        1. In the Bucket menu, select a bucket.

        2. In the Replication settings section, click Configure to configure settings for the replication job.

          The Configure cross-bucket replication pane appears.

          • To filter objects to replicate by object name prefix, enter a prefix that you want to include or exclude objects from, then click Add a prefix.
          • To set a storage class for the replicated objects, select a storage class from the Storage class menu. If you skip this step, the replicated objects will use the destination bucket's storage class by default.
          • Click Done.
    3. In the Choose how to store your data section, do the following:
      1. In the Set a default class section, select the following: Standard.
      2. To enable hierarchical namespace, in the Optimize storage for data-intensive workloads section, select Enable hierarchical namespace on this bucket.
    4. In the Choose how to control access to objects section, select whether or not your bucket enforces public access prevention, and select an access control method for your bucket's objects.
    5. In the Choose how to protect object data section, do the following:
      • Select any of the options under Data protection that you want to set for your bucket.
        • To enable soft delete, click the Soft delete policy (For data recovery) checkbox, and specify the number of days you want to retain objects after deletion.
        • To set Object Versioning, click the Object versioning (For version control) checkbox, and specify the maximum number of versions per object and the number of days after which the noncurrent versions expire.
        • To enable the retention policy on objects and buckets, click the Retention (For compliance) checkbox, and then do the following:
          • To enable Object Retention Lock, click the Enable object retention checkbox.
          • To enable Bucket Lock, click the Set bucket retention policy checkbox, and choose a unit of time and a length of time for your retention period.
      • To choose how your object data will be encrypted, expand the Data encryption section (), and select a Data encryption method.
  4. Click Create.

Make a request to Cloud Vision

  1. Save a local version of the sample image file (demo-img.jpg).

  2. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Cloud Storage Buckets page.

    Go to Buckets

  3. Select the bucket you created in the previous section.

  4. Click Upload Files and select the local version of the demo-img.jpg file to upload to your Cloud Storage bucket.

    The Upload files button.
    This is the image file that you just uploaded:
    Two women biking in Jakarta.
    Image credit: Rohiim Ariful on Unsplash.

  5. After the file is uploaded and appears in the Cloud Storage bucket, share the image publicly.

  6. In the Try this method section, complete the interactive API Explorer template by replacing cloud-samples-data/vision in the image.source.imageUri field with the name of the Cloud Storage bucket where you uploaded the demo-img.jpg file. The request body should look like the following: 

    { "requests": [ { "features": [ { "type": "LABEL_DETECTION" } ], "image": { "source": { "imageUri": "gs://cloud-samples-data/vision/demo-img.jpg" } } } ] }

  7. Click Execute to send the request to the service. The JSON response appears after the request body.

Congratulations! You've made your first images.annotate request to Cloud Vision.

Clean up

To avoid unnecessary Google Cloud charges, use the Google Cloud console to delete your Cloud Storage bucket (and your project) if you don't need them.

What's next

  • See a list of all feature types and their uses.
  • Get started with the Vision API in your language of choice by using a Vision API Client Library.
  • Use the How-to guides to learn more about specific features, see example annotations, and get annotations for an individual file or image.
  • Learn about batch image and file (PDF/TIFF/GIF) annotation.
  • Browse through a comprehensive list of client library code samples.