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Alabama Gardening

Smartphones and plant identification

13 years ago

I was just reading about applications available for my new Android smartphone, and Pogue in the NYT had this to say about one of the apps:

Even Google admits Goggles is "not so good" at identifying plants. For that you want Leafsnap, a free iPhone app that supplements a traditional field guide. You photograph a leaf on a white background within the app, which then scans the silhouette. The app then cross-references it with its built-in database. For each potential match, youÃ¯Â¿Â½re shown high-resolution images of the plantÃ¯Â¿Â½s leaves, flowers, fruit and bark. Your location is also recorded on a map so you can build a database of your urban forest.

Now isn't that a great development!!!

I do index my garden plants, but not so much the trees in the neighborhood. However, I'd love to add this capability to my new phone, if I can get it into my computer's index of plants in my garden.

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Comments (4)

alabamanicole
13 years ago
Leafsnap is supposed to be available for Android phones soon, however from what I understand the app really only works for species in the northeast US at this point (since that's where the volunteers are), and mostly trees.

A link to the list of species the app can identify is below.

Here is a link that might be useful: Leafsnap species
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User
Original Author
13 years ago
Thanks, Alabamanicole. Yes, I read about the region bias for the plant selections. But there is hope at least.

We need another Blanche Dean to create such a reference in Alabama. The book she wrote years ago was my first ever gardening reference.
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Bamatufa
13 years ago
Cool app ! Just be aware & careful that it is recording your location. You snap a pic of an extinct Dodo plant growing in your backyard you might find your house surrounded by uninvited onlookers.
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totoe
13 years ago
One other app is Gardener's Companion Free. It finds the hardiness zone for your zip code and gives you temperature, and percipitation charts:

https://market.android.com/details?id=toto.gardenerfree

the paid version (.99) finds the zone automatically from the GPS location. useful if you wondering around taking pictures of unusual trees and want to find out their zone.

Here is a link that might be useful: Gardener's Companion Free
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