We never see your photo.
Free Plant Identifier names plants from a photo. Take or upload a picture of a leaf, flower, fruit or bark and it shows up to 20 closest matches from 60,902 plants around the world. It is free, there is nothing to install, and your photo stays on your device.
Identify a plant
How does Free Plant Identifier work?
Other apps send your photo away to be identified. Here the identifier comes to you, and everything happens on your own device.
Your phone or computer
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Your photoRead inside your browser
- The identifierCompares it with 60,902 plants
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- Bluecrown Passionflower
- Woodland Passionflower
- Passiflora mooreana
- Passiflora smithii
- Passiflora tenuifila
Our server
- The identifier, once (35 MB)
- Sighting records for your wider region
- Your photo: never sent
Downloaded once
When you add your first photo, your browser downloads the identifier and keeps it in its cache. From then on your phone or computer does the work itself.
Better with more to go on
Add several photos of the same plant and it combines them into one answer. Switch on location and it cross-checks the matches against sightings recorded in your area, so plants that actually grow near you rank higher.
You make the final call
You get up to 20 matches, ranked from most likely down to unlikely. Open any match to put your photo beside real photos of that plant and judge for yourself.
How did we build it?
We built the identifier from 13,305,812 verified plant photos on iNaturalist, where people around the world record the plants they find and other naturalists check the identification. Every one is a confirmed sighting, and together they cover plants from every continent.
We then tested it on 3,880,456 real photos of 56,498 plants, all kept out of the build, with and without using where each photo was taken.
- Photo only
- 77.2%
- With location
- 88.3%
- Photo only
- 91.8%
- With location
- 96.6%
How much depends on the plant
One number hides this, so here is the full picture. Plants with few photos on record are harder to name, and the gap is largest on the first pick. These figures use location.
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Common10,673 plants with 1,000 or more photos on record
- First pick is right
- 89.0%
- Right plant in the top five
- 96.9%
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Uncommon26,820 plants with 100 to 999 photos on record
- First pick is right
- 84.7%
- Right plant in the top five
- 96.2%
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Rare23,409 plants with fewer than 100 photos on record
- First pick is right
- 59.0%
- Right plant in the top five
- 84.2%
Why is it different?
| Most plant apps | Free Plant Identifier | |
|---|---|---|
| Your photo | Uploaded to a server | Stays on your device |
| Identifications | Capped, or behind a subscription | No limit, always free |
| Getting started | Download an app | Open the page and go |
There is no account to create either, and the site runs no analytics and no tracking scripts.
What happens to your location?
Location is your choice: switch it off on the identifier at any time. Your exact location stays on your device. To cross-check sightings, the page downloads the records for your wider region, an area about 1,100 km across, so all our server ever sees is that download.