There is a particular frustration in holding an object you cannot name. You can describe it — brass, about eight inches, a hinged lid, some kind of screw thread on the base — but describing it is not the same as knowing what it is, and you cannot search for something when you do not know the word. A photo-based identifier closes that gap: you show it the object instead of trying to spell it.
Upload a photo and check free — takes 10 seconds
Identification comes before valuation
People usually arrive wanting a number, but the number is downstream of the name. Until you know that the thing on your table is a Victorian sugar nips rather than a pair of pliers, or a mocha ware jug rather than a piece of studio pottery, no price makes sense. Identification is the load-bearing step; everything else follows from it.
This matters more than it sounds because the price gap between adjacent categories is enormous. A pressed-glass bowl and an early cut-crystal bowl look similar in a dim room. One is worth a few pounds and the other several hundred. The difference is visible — pressed glass has mould seams and softer edges, cut glass has sharp facets and rings when tapped — but only if you know to look.
What a photo gives away
Material. Surfaces read differently under light. The particular grey of pewter against the warmer grey of silver plate with its copper showing through at wear points; the depth of lead crystal against the flatness of soda glass; bone versus early plastic versus ivory. These are the first fork in the identification.
Manufacturing method. How something was made dates it more reliably than its style, because styles get revived and methods do not. Hand-thrown pottery shows throwing rings inside; slip-cast pottery does not. Hand-cut dovetails are uneven; machine-cut ones repeat exactly. Mould seams, sprue marks, tool marks on a turned foot — each one is a date bracket.
Wear in the right places. Genuine age wears specifically: the base of a foot, the rim of a lid, the middle of a handle, the point where a drawer runs. Fake age wears generally, all over, because it was done with abrasive rather than by use. Where the wear is tells you as much as how much there is.
Marks, when they are visible. A maker’s mark, hallmark, registry number or impressed backstamp collapses a wide guess into a narrow answer. If your object has one, photograph it — that single frame is worth more than any other.
Using our free antique identifier
Upload one photograph. In roughly ten seconds you get a specific name for the object, its likely period, its category, a condition score and a sentence about what it was for and why it looks the way it does. No account, no email, and the photo is analysed and then discarded rather than stored.
If the identification comes back with low confidence, that is honest information rather than a failure. It usually means the photo is hiding something — a mark out of frame, a surface flattened by flash, a shape obscured by the angle. A second photo from a different angle often changes the answer.
Objects that are hardest to identify from a photo
Some things are genuinely difficult, and it is worth knowing which before you are disappointed.
Unmarked silver and silver plate. Without the hallmark in frame, telling sterling from a good plate is close to guesswork. Weight and a proper look at the wear points settle it; a photograph often cannot.
Reproduction furniture. Good reproductions from the 1920s and 1930s copied eighteenth-century forms faithfully and are now themselves old enough to have genuine wear. The tell is usually inside — drawer construction, secondary timbers, the back of a carcass — and that is rarely what people photograph.
Prints versus paintings. A photograph of a framed picture behind glass, taken at an angle with a reflection across it, cannot reveal brushwork. Take the shot square on, in daylight, with the glass at an angle that does not reflect the window.
Anything under a thick later varnish. Varnish yellows and obscures; it hides both damage and quality.
After the identification
Once you know what you have, the useful next step depends on the answer. A common object in ordinary condition needs nothing further — you have what you came for. Something unusual, or something with a mark you can now search properly, is worth taking further: a written report, a specialist auction house, or a proper in-person look.
Identify yours — free, one photo
Related
- Free antique appraisal — what a photo appraisal can and cannot tell you
- Free antique valuation — how values are actually arrived at