best plant id app

[leli]

I'm a learner gardener and I would like to use an iPhone plant id app. I downloaded one called "plant finder" but it seems to keep failing at the not specially unusual (I would have thought) weeds and plants in my South East England garden. Can you recommend a better one? BTW I love this gardening board, it's the best. I'm learning so much. thank you.

Picture This is great.

Looking at some of the spectacularly wide of the mark plant IDs on here and social media, many of which seem to come from the apps, I'd say they're all unreliable. Better to ask here or on gardening Twitter.

I use Picture This. I would say it’s around 80-90% accurate 😊🌱

I have found Plantnet app and also the Gardeners World forum is a good place to get help.

Ibiza is right. Remember that all plant apps work from pure picture matching against the internet "this picture has the same pattern or pink and white as this other picture" and don't have any botanical knowledge. So when they are wrong a) they don't give any indication that they might be wrong and b) they aren't just a bit wrong, they can be quite wildly wrong. There was an id on here not so long ago where the app identified a bush as a creeping succulent.

What really alarmed me (not on MN) was someone misidentifying a very common and well known garden shrub as deadly nightshade. If they're making that glaring error, they could simultaneously be ignoring plants that actually are toxic, thinking they're benign. I do wish people wouldn't slap labels on plants (whether they've got them from an app on from their own head) until they've googled or whatever to double-check.

until they've googled or whatever to double-check. Even googling has to be done with intelligence. I've seen people confidently give a name to a wildflower, with googled picture attached, when the named plant is a US native and doesn't grow in the UK.

Yep I downloaded two and tried them out on plants I know and they hit it wrong all the time

I've been using Leaf Snap - it seems quite accurate.