PictureThis - Plant Identifier
reviews and complaints

I don’t even remember where I saw the ad for this, but I searched it in the App Store and decided to give it a shot.

My parents recently bought a new home, which is beautiful, but it has LOTS of plants, flowers, trees, bushes, etc. in the back yard and we don’t know what many of them are.

We have two small dogs - a Pomsky (Pomeranian/Husky) and a Pom-Chow (Pomeranian/Chow-Chow) - that tend to eat everything and then get sick. It’s very difficult to look up a plant on google based on keywords and find the exact match (I like to know what the plants are so I know which ones to have relocated/removed if they’re toxic to my dogs).

This app has completely changed the game for me! It is SO quick and simple to use, and has accurately identified every single plant I’ve taken a photo of in the app. I’m completely amazed by the accuracy and usefulness of this app. It’s such a unique idea, and the details (photos, name/s, source, care, etc) that the app provides are absolutely incredible. I am upgrading from the free version as soon as I finish writing this review.

The free version does everything you could ever need, but the paid version allows for unlimited IDs and you can choose a photo from your gallery to identify, along with many other useful features. Don’t think you HAVE to upgrade, because you can get the important features (the ones that are advertised) in the free version, and watch ads to get more IDs if you use up the free ones. I just want to give the paid version a shot and see what all it does, and I’d love to identify more plants so I can make sure my doggies won’t get sick from them (and to satisfy my own personal curiosity).

Bottom line, this app is INCREDIBLE. The free version alone is amazing, and the “premium” just adds onto the already-incredible features. Well worth the low price they charge for premium, and definitely worth the minimal storage it takes up for just the free version!

I have been using this app for a little over 2 years and have only encountered 2 unidentified species of plant that were not in the system to date. Both species were identified by the nursery and both were exotic .

As a owner of an 1.5 acre lot where the wild things grow, an avid adopter of indoor plant babies , and a forager this app has been indispensable to me. The added features of illness diagnoses , insect identification, bird identification, toxicity to animals etc. makes it worth every penny for the premium annual fee of just $30!

I have two young daughters and my 11 year old I have even downloaded on her phone. She loves identifying plants birds and insects outdoors and has used it for school projects to help identify leaves etc.

I use their “my plants” function to keep track of all my indoor plants and garden vegetables . It is my virtual care journal that even functions to remind me when to fertilize and water.

I have used “diagnose my plant” to identify the growth issue or irregularities to set up a care plan for the plant which also sends out important notifications around the care plan.

The “get help” feature saved my poor tomato plants last year when I just couldn’t figure out this new to me problem. I took pictures and submitted to the app and within 24 hours was chatting with a master gardener who had diagnosed and was giving me products or natural methods I could try to treat the disease. She even checked back after a week to see if I had resolved the issue. It saved my tomato plants.

If you have read this far in the review you can guess that I highly recommend this app. Also, I’m not a novice to gardening and plants, everything is double checked and cross referenced and I haven’t found an error yet! Unheard of!

Yes, I’m a real person. Yes, I recommend. Yes, I waited over a year to review. No, I don’t usually leave reviews but feel so strongly about the usefulness of this app to plant parents, foragers, and gardeners that I traveled over to the App Store to encourage you to take advantage of this wonderful product that has obviously been the brain child of many.

Yes this app from what I’ve seen on people’s phone last that paid for it works very well.. it gives a lot of info on what I wanted which was care and maintenance of the plants, as well as soil needs, sun and zone conditions BUT ..
When you install the app you can’t even test it out before paying. Literally nothing in the app will work with out paying .. $30 a year are you kidding me. These developers have gotten insane with this subscription model crap. I just won’t have any part of it any more .. who could own a phone and sit there and pay subscriptions for every app on your phone. I have no problem paying to buy the software outright cause then what does it matter if I barely use the app. But when you have 10-20 apps on the phone and they all want to start charging 10/ month to 30 a year. Do the math no body is going to do that .. we already pay a fortune just to buy these over priced phones and seriously overpriced phone plans !

App subscriptions have to die. I suggest no one buys one and see if we can bring these developers back into reality

I’m sick and tired of these deceitful apps illegally charging users for transactions they never did. Fake “free week”. Enough is enough. I just left a review earlier and now it disappeared. Go figure..

When you search for the app in the APP store there’s no price for it. That means it’s free. Only after you spend the time and energy to download it and use it a screen pops up to sign up for 1 YEAR subscription and try FREE for a week. I tried it for 2 days and unsubscribed because it kept giving me wrong information. I got charged $4.99 regardless. So not only you don’t mention this app costs money until you download it but you advertise a FREE WEEK scam for $4.99?

You have 150,000 downloads. If only 10% of these users got charged $4.99 “accidentally” that’s 15,000 users x $4.99. That’s $75,000. How many users got charged $4.99 accidentally and how many went through the process to appeal the charge and get a refund.

If you want to charge people for your stupid app then STATE so clearly. Don’t lie to them and secretly charge people. That’s illegal. Go ahead. Tell me how that was an error or how I must have clocked something. I have the screenshots

Update: Notice how the developer response doesn’t solve a single problem in my original review? And just directs me to the folks I said I’d already been talking to? I really want to like this app but their developers suuuuuuck.

Original Review: I thought this app was great until I tried family sharing. Everything about this experience has been bad. I used an apple-generated email to create an account. But I needed to log in on the other family-member’s phone for it to work. I used the apple-generated email to request a password reset so I could use the email on my partner’s phone for family-sharing but PictureThis has not registered their email servers to send to apple’s email-routing. So I unbound the auto-generated email so I could use my email. Whoops. My account is bound to the Apple-generated email that no longer exists. I’ve been talking to “support” for a month and they keep suggesting solutions that don’t apply to this app or to my situation. Now when I open the app it says my subscription expired. But, guess what? If I try to subscribe it fails because I already have a subscription. Deleting this and will go directly to Apple to refund my 1-year family plan.

When you have an app that charges this kinda $$$ & has DAILY negative feedback - well, buyer beware... I never, ever, ever write reviews, but I cant keep silent any longer - something else has become endemic besides COVID: app disappointment I am fed up with programmers who design so-so algorithms & then try to make a quick hefty buck off hardworking people. This app looks to have the potential to be a phenomenal assistive app, buuuuuuut... programmers you gotta STOP BLAMING YOUR AI for all buyer disappointment! We are disappointed because your app lacks the value you have placed on it. We are disappointed because we feel betrayed by you, who said they would perform a service that they are incapable of performing. Yo- If your AI continues to have " a significant learning curve," then PRICE ACCORDINGLY & PERFECT YOUR ALGORITHM! Programmers you are double benefiting from each new app user - benefiting from their analytics & benefiting from their app payment With each new app user, AI improves (or it should if you have continued quality improvement) and so does your bank account Programmer. Please Programmer, do what's right & do your best, always. Just remember - Karma's a big Bizzzztch

I tried to cancel my free trial, and boy I am glad I did it almost immediately! You go in to cancel and they say “we sent you an email that shows you how to do this, look for it within 48 hours”. And it took 48 hours to arrive. Then it gives you a link to follow that doesn’t work. The email says, if the links doesn’t work, you have to go into your iTunes via settings and follow these instructions. And then, AND ONLY THEN, does it say that if you do not cancel within 24 hours of the end of your free trial, you will be charged.

If I had asked for that cancellation at the end of the trial, I would have been charged. If I thought that telling them I wanted to cancel was enough (like a normal person) I would have been charged. If I was daunted by the dead link or if I was intimidated by how they were telling me to do it manually, I would have been charged. If I hadn’t acted on their email immediately, I would have been charged.

You need to cancel more than 48 hours before your week free trial ends or you will be charged. They set it up so that it isn’t easy, that a simple request doesn’t produce a simple response and it’s a trick to make those charges happen. Enough people don’t fight it (or don’t fight it effectively) so this is a financially productive business model.

Duck them.

Update: Not sure what’s going on since the recent update but I’m getting no internet errors when I try to complete the tasks. Everything else works as normal. But now I have overdue care tasks on all my plants. I’ve reached out to for help and it has not been fixed. Very disappointing. I paid for a full year so I’ve been trying to stick it out but I’m having to use other apps to track the care of my plants. I’ll most likely cancel my subscription and subscribe to the premium version of one of those instead.
Original: Its the best app I’ve found for identification and tracking but it’s far from great. It’s ID’d almost all of my plants as Jade Plants at some point and none of them are Jade. And most of the information provided is the same but has whatever plant you’re looking at inserted. So once you’ve read it a few times you’ll recognize it immediately on each new plant. That wouldn’t be terrible but the same pictures are used for every plant so they’re not really helpful at all. If I’m looking for propagation instructions for an aloe plant, why would I want to see pictures of the process for a crassula? Would also be helpful if you could combine results. I have some that were ID’d as one thing when I first got them but found out they were actually something else recently. It would be nice to combine those results to have an accurate record of those plants.

A plant identification app has one primary purpose: to accurately identify plants. This one doesn’t. I live with a plant professional with over 35 years of experience. I purchased the app two days ago and since then have taken 48 photos of plants in our yard. Of these, Plant Identifier has accurately identified 20 of them. I took photos a second and third time at different angles and distances. In several cases, the app would come up with a different identification of the plant in the photo each time the photo was taken, but with another wrong identification. In some, the IDs were not even close to the correct name of the plant.

Not only that, but few of the plants I’ve photographed have been identified by variety—the most important way to compare plants within a particular genus or species. But with Plant Identifier, every snake plant is identified as just that, “snake plant,” no matter how different the many different varieties look from each other.

For those of you who thought you were purchasing a great plant identifier app, think again. Many of the plants you have identified using Plant Identifier have been misidentified, if my average so far of less than 50% accuracy has any merit at all. Unless you are fortunate enough to have a professional who knows the plants you are adding to your collection, as I have, I am sorry to have to tell you that you have purchased a bum steer.