App for identifying plants.

I like taking photos of flowers.  I am by no means a botanist or expert on plants, just an amateur photographer who likes to share some of my photos online.  It’s nice to be able to provide accurate information such as the name of plants that are the subject of a photo.

I found over the years that it was often difficult to identify plants that I had taken pictures of.  Sure, there are online sources that can be referenced, but they all required browsing images of flowers trying to find one that looked close.  I was usually successful, but it still took time, sometimes a lot of time for a single photo.

In 2018, Karen came across an app on the iPhone called PictureThis  (also available on Google Play). It was amazingly good at finding matches for the plants we saw along the trail, usually offering up several options for what it might be when we snapped an image into the app.  It’s even better now.

However, I never thought to use it for pictures that I had already taken until quite a while later.  It’s really easy to pull a photo from the pictures on the phone and the app identifies the plant really fast.

But what about photos that aren’t on the phone?

The picture above was taken on August 23, 2004 using a Kodak Easyshare DX4530 5.0 mp digital camera (there is one currently available on eBay for $12.99).

I opened the file for the image on my desktop computer and snapped a photo of the image displayed on my screen.  I then pulled that into PictureThis and, in short order, had this result:

The plant is called golden crownbeard (verbesina encelioides)

Verbesina encelioides is a flowering plant in the family Asteraceae. The species is native to many parts of the United States and Mexico. It is naturalized in other parts of North America, the Middle East, Spain, Argentina, Australia and the Pacific islands. Common names include golden crownbeard, gold weed, wild sunflower, cowpen daisy, butter daisy, crown-beard, American dogweed and South African daisy. [Wikipedia]

The app is available in both a free and pay version.  We find that the free version does everything we need for it to do.