Not sure if the three-leafed plant you just walked through is poison ivy? Well, now it’s easy to check with a plant identifier app on your smartphone. Find out immediately with just a quick snap of a photo. Plant and flower identification apps can instantly give you answers from the name of what you’re looking at to information on how to care for it, the berries or flowers it produces, and more! From identifying trees, plant diseases, or an unknown flower, the different plant, and flower ID apps available have something for everyone. Here at Kitty’s Flowers, Salisbury, Ocean Pines, and Berlin’s best florist, we’ve compiled a list of top plant identification apps so you can review and choose the perfect one for your interests.
Highly-Rated Plant & Flower ID Apps
PlantSnap
This free app has over 500,000 species of flowers, plants, succulents, mushrooms, and cacti in its database and over 150 million images. This app offers up quick identification from a photo of a plant, leaf, or part of a plant with the use of artificial intelligence technology. Tutorials help those who are new to the program and offer tips on the best way to take a photo of the plant you’re interested in. If your plant is not already in the database, you can save it, thus adding to the continuous learning feature of this app.
LeafSnap
With beautiful, high-resolution images of leaves, flowers, seeds, petioles, bark, and fruit, LeafSnap identifies tree and plant species from photographs of their leaves. Developed by the Smithsonian Institute and Columbia University, this free mobile app includes trees of the Northeastern U.S. and Canada and will soon include trees of the entire continental US.
PlantNet
A popular, free app, PlantNet utilizes visual recognition software to scan your photo and provide potential matches. After uploading an image, you are asked to choose whether it’s a leaf, stem, flower, or fruit to enhance accuracy. This app aims to give you a better understanding of all the different varieties of plants living in nature around us, such as flowering plants, trees, ferns, vines, grasses, and cacti. All images uploaded are collected and studied by scientists to get a better understanding of plant biodiversity and how to preserve it.
PictureThis
PictureThis is a flower and plant identification app which uses AI to identify a large variety of flora. With a claim of 99% accuracy, the developers consider this app like having a “botanist in your pocket.” PictureThis can also help identify plant diseases and offers a good deal of information on a particular item, how to care and grow plants, controlling pests, and more. It also provides a social network for plant and flower lovers. This app is subscription-based but does offer a free 7-day trial.
Plant ID Apps Honorable Mentions
A few more plant identification apps worth checking out are:
Don’t forget about the wildflowers!