Flower Identifier
Photograph a bloom and find out what it is. Free, no account, and every answer shows how confident it is and which floral features it used.
Add up to 3 photos of the same flower
The bloom face-on is the one that matters. Leaves and stem settle the near-misses.
What actually identifies a flower
Botanists key flowers on structure, not colour. The decisive features are petal count, symmetry, whether petals are free or fused, and how the reproductive parts are arranged — all of which stay constant within a species while colour does not.
- Symmetry
- A daisy is radially symmetrical — rotate it and it looks the same. An orchid or a pea flower is bilaterally symmetrical, with a single mirror line. This one distinction splits large parts of the plant kingdom immediately.
- Petal count and fusion
- Counts often run in family-typical numbers — threes in lilies and irises, fives in roses and mallows. Whether petals are separate or fused into a tube or bell narrows it further.
- Inflorescence
- How blooms sit on the stem: singly, in a flat-topped umbel like cow parsley, in a spike, or packed into a head like a sunflower. What looks like one daisy flower is really hundreds of tiny ones.
- The centre
- Stamen count and arrangement, and the shape of the style, separate species whose petals look alike. This is why a face-on photo beats an angled one.
How to photograph a flower for identification
Shoot straight into the open bloom in daylight, close enough that the centre is sharp. Then add a side view and the leaves — those two extra photos resolve most of the cases a single bloom cannot.
- Photograph a fully open flower — buds hide the features that matter.
- Keep the centre in focus, not just the petal edges.
- Include a side view so the calyx and how the bloom meets the stem are visible.
- Avoid flash — it blows out pale petals and destroys the detail in the centre.
Questions people ask
How do I identify a flower from a photo?
Photograph the bloom face-on so the petals and centre are both visible, then upload it. The identifier returns the most likely species in seconds along with a confidence score. Adding the leaves and stem makes the result considerably more reliable.
What features identify a flower?
Petal count, whether the flower is radially symmetrical like a daisy or bilaterally symmetrical like an orchid, whether petals are separate or fused into a tube, and how blooms are arranged on the stem. These carry far more information than colour, which varies within a single species.
Can I identify a plant that is not flowering?
Yes, but use the plant identifier rather than this one. Without a bloom, identification relies on leaf shape, arrangement, and growth habit, and the plant tool weighs those features instead of floral structure.
Why does flower colour not identify the species?
Colour varies enormously within one species and between cultivars of the same plant. Roses, tulips, and hydrangeas all come in many colours while remaining the same species, so structure is the reliable signal and colour is only a weak supporting clue.
Can it tell a wildflower from a garden flower?
It identifies the species, and the species itself tells you which it is. Many garden plants are cultivated forms of wild species, so expect the wild species name for a cultivar unless the cultivar has strongly distinctive features.
Is this flower identifier free?
Yes. No account, no card, and no app to install. It runs in your browser on any phone or computer.
Not a flower?
Use the plant identifier for a plant that is not in bloom, or the leaf identifier if all you have is a single leaf. Each keys on different features.