When I first started experimenting with this project I ran into several difficulties with using the Visual Recognition service. After much debugging and some much appreciated help from IBM Cloud support, it was determined that the project code that I was using was using an older version of the cloud API.
To resolve the issues I was seeing, it was necessary to upgrade the Watson service to the latest version using the following command:
# --- Upgrade Watson Developer
!pip install --upgrade "watson-developer-cloud>-2.8.0"
The preceding command generates the following output:
To validate that the service was upgraded, you should see the following message:
Successfully installed watson-developer-cloud-2.8.0 websocket-client-0.48.0
Once the service was upgraded, all of the issues I was previously experiencing were resolved.
At the time of writing, 2.8.0 is the latest release. It is advisable to always check for and use the latest available version.