‘When You See It’: 40 Perfectly Camouflaged Things That Will Probably Take Too Long To Find, As Shared On This Online Group

The Find the Sniper subreddit was created in 2014 and has been hiding in plain sight on Reddit ever since. That’s right, the group has a whopping 86.8k members, but if you’ve never heard of it, you’ve likely been overlooking it the same way we miss the details hidden in these photos. There is something equally frustrating and satisfying about these pictures featuring hidden elements that are way too easy to miss, and clearly, many people love challenging their brains by hopping onto this subreddit regularly.

I can’t help but feel like the pictures featured here are versions of Where’s Waldo? or the classic I Spy books on steroids. I used to love those brightly colored images splashed across large pages of books when I was a kid, and knowing that I had located Waldo or the perfect object always made me feel so brilliant. But the beauty of Find the Sniper is that many of these pictures were not carefully orchestrated or planned. Many of them were accidents, perfectly timed snaps, or only photographed after the person observed how challenging an object was to spot in real life. 

Find the Sniper may have only been around for less than a decade, but the fun of searching for objects in images is nothing new. If you’re a fan of the I Spy books, you might be interested to know that the images featured in them are even more calculated than you might have expected. The photographer behind those vibrant and captivating images, Walter Wick, was interviewed by Insider in 2019 and explained his process for creating the photos. They were all made using real objects, rather than drawings or editing on a computer.

Before venturing into the world of I Spy, Wick had been working as a commercial photographer in New York City. One evening in the early 1980s, he took a photo of spare nuts and bolts that had been laying around his studio and used the image to promote his work. The author of I Spy, Jean Marzollo, ended up seeing the picture and asked Wick to create a photo for her magazine, Let’s Find Out. An editor at Scholastic Books saw that photo and reached out to Wick and Marzollo about creating a children’s search and find book, which soon became the beloved classic we know today.