Cloud Vision API C++ Client Library

An idiomatic C++ client library for theCloud Vision API. Integrate Google Vision features, including image labeling, face, logo, and landmark detection, optical character recognition (OCR), and detection of explicit content, into applications.

While this library isGA, please note Google Cloud C++ client libraries donot followSemantic Versioning.

Quickstart

The following shows the code that you'll run in thegoogle/cloud/vision/quickstart/ directory, which should give you a taste of the Cloud Vision API C++ client library API.

#include "google/cloud/vision/v1/image_annotator_client.h"#include <iostream>int main(int argc, char* argv[]) try {  auto constexpr kDefaultUri =      "gs://cloud-samples-data/vision/label/wakeupcat.jpg";  if (argc > 2) {    std::cerr << "Usage: " << argv[0] << " [gcs-uri]\n"              << "  The gcs-uri must be in gs://... format. It defaults to "              << kDefaultUri << "\n";    return 1;  }  auto uri = std::string{argc == 2 ? argv[1] : kDefaultUri};  namespace vision = ::google::cloud::vision_v1;  auto client =      vision::ImageAnnotatorClient(vision::MakeImageAnnotatorConnection());  // Define the image we want to annotate  google::cloud::vision::v1::Image image;  image.mutable_source()->set_image_uri(uri);  // Create a request to annotate this image with Request text annotations for a  // file stored in GCS.  google::cloud::vision::v1::AnnotateImageRequest request;  *request.mutable_image() = std::move(image);  request.add_features()->set_type(      google::cloud::vision::v1::Feature::TEXT_DETECTION);  google::cloud::vision::v1::BatchAnnotateImagesRequest batch_request;  *batch_request.add_requests() = std::move(request);  auto batch = client.BatchAnnotateImages(batch_request);  if (!batch) throw std::move(batch).status();  // Find the longest annotation and print it  auto result = std::string{};  for (auto const& response : batch->responses()) {    for (auto const& annotation : response.text_annotations()) {      if (result.size() < annotation.description().size()) {        result = annotation.description();      }    }  }  std::cout << "The image contains this text: " << result << "\n";  return 0;} catch (google::cloud::Status const& status) {  std::cerr << "google::cloud::Status thrown: " << status << "\n";  return 1;}

Main classes

This library offers multiple*Client classes, which are listed below. Each one of these classes exposes all the RPCs for a service as member functions of the class. This library groups multiple services because they are part of the same product or are often used together. A typical example may be the administrative and data plane operations for a single product.

The library also has other classes that provide helpers, configuration parameters, and infrastructure to mock the*Client classes when testing your application.

More Information

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Last updated 2026-02-20 UTC.