Wood Identifier

Diagnostic Tool

Wood Identifier — Identify Any Timber from a Photo

Free online wood identification. Upload a clear close-up of any wood surface and we’ll identify the likely species, family, and characteristics from the grain — covering the main domestic European hardwoods (oak, ash, beech, walnut, cherry, maple, sycamore, elm), North American species, tropical exotics (teak, mahogany, sapele, iroko, padauk, rosewood, ebony, wenge), and softwoods such as pine, spruce, cedar and Douglas fir.

Drop a wood photo here, or click to choose

Tap to take a photo or choose from gallery

Plain-grain close-up of unfinished wood works best. Any size — large images are auto-resized.

If the camera doesn’t open, try Safari, or upload from your camera roll.

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Couldn’t analyse that image.

Need a turned component in this species?

We turn spindles, newels, finials, balls, hemispheres, cones, plinths, table tops and architectural details to order in over 80 hardwoods and softwoods — including European Oak, English Walnut, European Ash, European Beech, Sycamore, Sapele, Iroko, Teak, and many tropicals on request.

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Free for your site

Run a wood-related site? Borrow our identifier — with our compliments.

If you write about timber, restore listed buildings, run a joinery, mill bespoke flooring, survey period properties, sell wood, or teach woodworking — you’re welcome to embed this tool on your own site, free of charge, no sign-up, no API key, no usage limit. Your visitors get instant species identification; you get a sticky page that keeps them on your domain instead of bouncing to a search engine.

We don’t charge a fee. We don’t paywall it. The only thing we ask is a small credit line linking back to farwinger.com — a fair trade, we think, for a tool that runs on top of two state-of-the-art vision models.

Drop this anywhere on your site

<iframe src="https://farwinger.com/pages/wood-identifier"
        width="100%" height="900" frameborder="0" loading="lazy"
        title="Wood Identifier — identify any timber from a photo"
        style="border:0;border-radius:6px;max-width:920px;display:block;margin:0 auto"></iframe>
<p style="font-size:12px;color:#888;text-align:center;margin-top:8px">
  Wood identifier by <a href="https://farwinger.com" rel="noopener">Farwinger</a>
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Verified safe:Norton Safe Web↗Sucuri SiteCheck↗Google Safe Browsing↗

All three verifications are live, third-party scans — click any badge for the current report. The embed loads inside a sandboxed iframe, so it can’t access your site’s code, cookies or visitor data, and your site can’t access ours. Photos uploaded for identification are processed once and never stored.

Prefer a custom integration, your own branding, white-label deployment, or a higher rate-limit API? We do that too — get in touch and we’ll sort it. Bonus: tell us where it lives and we’ll happily link back to your site from ours.

Identifications are estimates from a single photo and should be treated as a starting point. For commercial timber grading, structural engineering, listed-building work, CITES-restricted species, or legal disputes, please confirm with a qualified timber merchant, dendrologist, or laboratory analysis. Photos uploaded to this tool are processed for identification only and not stored.

How wood identification works

Wood identification relies on a small number of macroscopic features that, taken together, point to a specific species or genus. The most diagnostic is pore distribution: ring-porous timbers (oak, ash, elm, sweet chestnut, hickory, mulberry) show large earlywood pores in distinct bands; diffuse-porous timbers (maple, birch, beech, cherry, walnut, sycamore, lime, most tropicals) have evenly distributed pores; semi-ring-porous species sit between the two.

Add to that ray pattern (oak’s broad medullary rays produce the unmistakable tiger stripe on quarter-sawn faces; sycamore has the largest rays of any temperate timber; maple’s rays are fine), heartwood and sapwood colour, grain direction, and figure, and most commercial timbers can be identified from a clear photograph of the grain.