Thread: Is their an "APP" to identify timer please??

Sorry, but it's pie in the sky and, to my mind, likely to stay so.

Such a database would be good for looking up what to expect from an identified timber, but to identify a specific timber requires much more info.

A botanist would require pics of bark, end-grain, leaves, flowers, fruit, etc. and still come back with "It is most likely to be..."

An app doing that? Nar. Even if one does exist, I wouldn't rely on it to be any more accurate than asking a random bloke in the street.

Crowie, there are a few online resources for wood ID that are useful but are in no way definitive nor 100% accurate, such as

Hobbit House Glossary (hobbithouseinc.com)
HobbitHouse Wood ID site (hobbithouseinc.com)

&

The Wood Database (wood-database.com)

There are also very useful dichotomus keys (a decision process that gradually narrows the possible candidates) for tree identification,

Eucs - EUCLID Home (lucidcentral.org)

Acacia's - Wattle Home (lucidcentral.org)

and many more, some regional vegetation specific,

Flora of Victoria (rbg.vic.gov.au) etc

Timber often requires more than just a visual to determin its lineage. All the other senses come into play. Particularly smell and feel.
For example, the only reliable way to pick Flooded gum from Sydney blue gum is by rubbing the bark between the palms of your hands. One will give you tiny splinters the other will not.

Originally Posted by rustynail

Timber often requires more than just a visual to determin its lineage. All the other senses come into play. Particularly smell and feel.
For example, the only reliable way to pick Flooded gum from Sydney blue gum is by rubbing the bark between the palms of your hands. One will give you tiny splinters the other will not.

So you let your wife rub the barks and let you know the out come. Playing ignorant of course!

Originally Posted by The Spin Doctor

So you let your wife rub the barks and let you know the out come. Playing ignorant of course!

My wife used to make a buck during her university years as a hand model. So what do you reckon my chances would be?

Crowie, there is nothing wrong with your thinking, it's just that it may be a few years ahead of the technology...

As the others have said, identification of a piece of wood by appearance alone is a fraught business, I keep sayin', there is a reason so many different species have the same common name. You only have to read a few requests for id threads in the "Timber section" to appreciate how many possibilities a couple of blurry pics suggest! There are exceptions, of course, a few (very few) woods have such a characteristic appearance there is simply no alternative.

But don't despair, many years ago (late 70s) various people were working on programmes to interpret microscopic tissue sections. At the time I thought it was complete pie-in-the-sky stuff, it takes years of training to become a competent histopathologist, & all sorts of lateral knowledge & thinking goes into making a diagnosis, just like id'ng a piece of wood. But they persevered & now there are automated "slide readers" that for certain tasks are faster than humans & more accurate (they don't get bored witless & lose concentration).

And as alluded to above, there are species that even the best AI could not sort with the limited input of gross & macrocroscopic data. Getting down to genus would be easy enough, I think, and for genera that have only few species over a large region that would be as close as you'd need. But with over 600 species in "Eucalyptus", getting to genus doesn't advance you very far. You could get to certain groups of species no doubt, but even then you'd be dealing with a range of potential properties that matter to a woodworker.

But stay hopeful, given the processor grunt & memory of modern phones, I reckon an ap could be written that would combine pics of face, side & end grain & come up with a short-list of possibilities for a given region or country. The main impediment, I suggest, is that the market is too limited for the expense involved in developing the programme & compiling the necessary background database, in fact compiling a suitable database would be a huge task. For a market that would be counted in the thousands rather than millions of users, the cost would be prohibitive.
Cheers,
Ian

There sure is Crowie.

Its called Woodworkforums, may take a while to get the answer you're after. But you'll get a better outcome than any app