In order to identify an object, human eyes firstly search the field of view for points or areas which have particular properties. These properties are used to recognise an image or an object. Then this process could be taken as a model to develop computer algorithms for images identification. This paper proposes the idea of applying the simplified firefly algorithm to search for key-areas in 2D images. For a set of input test images the proposed version of firefly algorithm has been examined. Research results are presented and discussed to show the efficiency of this evolutionary computation method.