Antique Identifier

Antique Identification Guides

Marks, hallmarks, eras and tell-tale details — practical identification guides from the team behind the Antique Identifier app.

100 guides · About the app

• How to Identify Antiques: The Five-Step Method Professionals Use

  Marks, construction, materials, style and wear — the systematic method for identifying almost any old object, and the order that saves you f

  3 min read

• Antique vs Vintage vs Retro: What the Words Actually Mean

  Dealers, auction houses and customs officers use these words precisely — most listings don't. The real definitions, why the 100-year rule ma

  3 min read

• Porcelain Marks Identification: How to Read the Bottom of Any Piece

  Crossed swords, crowns, beehives and backstamps — the grammar of porcelain marks, the dating clues hidden in wording, and the famous marks e

  3 min read

• Silver Hallmarks: The Complete Beginner's Guide to Reading Them

  Lions, anchors, date letters and 925s — silver is the best-documented antique category on earth if you can read its stamps. British, America

  3 min read

• How to Spot Reproduction Antiques: The 10 Tells That Expose Fakes

  Reproductions outnumber originals in every popular category. The ten tells professionals check — wear logic, tool marks, hardware, materials

  3 min read

• What Makes Antiques Valuable? The Six Factors Behind Every Price

  Age alone is nearly worthless — a 150-year-old Bible proves it. Rarity, demand, condition, provenance, quality and story: how the six factor

  3 min read

• How AI Identifies Antiques From a Photo (and Where It Still Needs You)

  What actually happens when a vision model examines your heirloom — feature matching, mark reading, style classification — plus the honest bo

  3 min read

• How to Photograph Antiques for Identification: The Shot List That Gets Answers

  One dim photo of the whole cabinet gets a shrug; seven deliberate shots get a maker and era. The exact shot list, lighting setup and mark-ph

  3 min read

• How to Identify Antique Furniture: Construction Never Lies

  Style can be revived; saw marks can't. The construction-first method for dating furniture — joints, saws, wood, hardware, finish — with the

  3 min read

• Dating Furniture by Dovetail Joints: A Field Guide

  The corner of a drawer is a signed date. Hand-cut vs machine dovetails, the Knapp joint's precise 1870–1900 window, and what each pattern pr

  3 min read

• Dating Antiques by Screws and Nails: Tiny Hardware, Exact Decades

  Fasteners are archaeology in miniature — hand-forged, cut, wire; hand-cut threads to Phillips heads. The timeline that dates furniture, boxe

  3 min read

• Real Patina vs Fake Aging: How Time Actually Marks Objects

  Patina is chemistry plus decades — oxidation gradients, wax depth, wear logic. Fakers use stain, acid and torches. The differences you can s

  3 min read

• Meissen Crossed Swords: Reading Europe's Most Imitated Porcelain Mark

  The blue crossed swords have been copied for 300 years — sometimes legally. How the genuine mark evolved by period, the imitators to know, a

  3 min read

• Limoges Marks: Identifying France's Porcelain — and Its Two-Mark Secret

  'Limoges' is a city of many factories, not one maker. Decoding Haviland, T&V and friends, the whiteware-vs-decorator double marks, and why '

  3 min read

• Wedgwood Marks: Dating 260 Years of England's Great Pottery

  Impressed stamps, the three-letter date code, 'England' vs 'Made in England' — Wedgwood documented itself better than almost any maker. The

  3 min read

• Nippon Marks: The 30-Year Window That Dates Japanese Porcelain Exactly

  'Nippon' on porcelain means 1891–1921, by American tariff law — a precise dating gift. The mark varieties, the Noritake connection, and the

  3 min read

• 'Made in Occupied Japan': The Seven-Year Mark That Built a Collecting Field

  1945–1952, by decree of the Allied occupation — the most precisely datable mark in ceramics. What OJ pieces are, what they're worth, and the

  3 min read

• English Registry Marks: The Diamond That Dates Victorian Wares to the Day

  The lozenge-shaped mark on Victorian ceramics, glass and metalwork encodes an exact registration date — and 'Rd No' numbers continue the sys

  3 min read

• Delft Pottery Identification: Real Delftware vs a World of Blue-and-White

  Not everything blue and white is Delft, and not all Delft is old. Tin-glaze vs porcelain, the De Porceleyne Fles marks, English delftware, a

  3 min read

• Dresden vs Meissen: Two Names, One Confusion, Very Different Values

  Auction listings blur them constantly. Meissen is a factory; Dresden was a decorating scene — crowns, lace figurines and all. How to tell th

  3 min read

• Gold Hallmarks and Marks: Reading Karats, Crowns and Convention Stamps

  375, 585, 750, 14K, 'rolled gold' and the tiny pictorial stamps — the complete decoder for gold jewelry marks, plus the tests for when marks

  3 min read

• Roseville Pottery Identification: Patterns, Marks and the Reproduction Plague

  America's favorite art pottery — and its most reproduced. Reading Roseville's marks by era, knowing the patterns that matter, and the mold-a

  3 min read

• McCoy Pottery Marks and the Cookie-Jar Kingdom

  The most common mark in American thrift stores — and still full of surprises. McCoy's mark evolution, the cookie jars and planters that matt

  3 min read

• Hull Pottery Identification: From Little Red Riding Hood to Matte Pastels

  Hull's soft matte florals and famous storybook jar built a devoted mid-century following. Marks by era, the pre-fire vs post-fire distinctio

  3 min read

• Weller Pottery: Identifying the Art Lines Before the Marks Help You

  Once America's largest art pottery, Weller ran from hand-decorated masterpieces to molded garden ware. The line-first identification method,

  3 min read

• Depression Glass Identification: Patterns, Colors and the Repro Minefield

  The free glassware of the 1930s became a giant collecting field. How to identify patterns and colors, which pieces carry real value, and the

  3 min read

• Carnival Glass Identification: Iridescence, Patterns and Real vs Late Repro

  The poor man's Tiffany — pressed glass with sprayed-on rainbow. Reading base colors vs surface shimmer, the Fenton/Northwood mark clues, and

  3 min read

• Uranium Glass: The Blacklight Test and What the Glow Really Tells You

  Glass that glows radioactive green under UV — genuinely made with uranium, genuinely safe to own. What glows and what doesn't, vaseline vs c

  3 min read

• Cut Glass vs Pressed Glass: The Touch-and-Look Tests That Sort Them Instantly

  One was ground by hand on stone wheels; the other squeezed from molds by the million. Sharpness, seams, ring and light — four tests that sep

  3 min read

• Identifying Wood in Antique Furniture: Grain, Color and Era Logic

  Oak's rays, walnut's chocolate, mahogany's ribbon, pine's knots — reading timber by eye, and how wood choice itself dates and locates a piec

  3 min read

• Furniture Styles by Era: The Field Guide From Queen Anne to Mid-Century

  A one-page style vocabulary — the leg shapes, feet, ornament and silhouettes that place any piece in its design era, with the revival traps

  2 min read

• Victorian Furniture Identification: Which Victorian Is It?

  'Victorian' spans six decades and five competing revival styles. Telling Rococo from Renaissance from Eastlake, the factory-vs-cabinetmaker

  3 min read

• Mid-Century Modern Identification: Labels, Joints and the Designer Premium

  The hottest vintage category runs on names — Eames, Wegner, Juhl — and swarms with copies. Where real labels hide, the construction tells, a

  3 min read

• Furniture Labels, Stamps and Signatures: Where Makers Hide Their Names

  Paper labels in drawers, brands on rails, chalk tallies and journeyman stamps — the full map of where furniture signs itself, and how to aut

  3 min read

• Should You Restore That Antique? The Value Math of Refinishing and Repair

  The refinishing that 'ruined grandpa's dresser' vs the repair that saved a chair — when restoration adds value, when it deletes it, and the

  3 min read

• Silver Plate vs Sterling: The Distinction Worth Hundreds

  EPNS, quadruple plate, weighted sterling and the magnet myth — how to tell solid silver from plated in one minute, and why some plate is wor

  3 min read

• Artificially Aged Brass, Copper and Iron: Instant 'Antiques' Exposed

  Acid dips, torch tarnish and buried-in-the-yard rust — how fake metal aging is made, and the touch, smell and structure tests that catch it

  3 min read

• Antique Pewter Identification: Touch Marks, Tell-Tale Weight and the Repro Flood

  Real pewter carries maker touch marks and centuries of soft gray glow. Reading the marks, distinguishing period pewter from gift-shop 'armet

  3 min read

• Bronze vs Spelter: The Five-Second Tests That Protect Your Wallet

  Half the 'bronzes' at markets are zinc spelter worth a tenth as much. Weight, sound, scratch color and casting quality — the tests, plus rea

  3 min read

• Bakelite Jewelry Identification: The Tests That Actually Work

  The 1930s plastic that outprices silver — and the celluloid, lucite and 'fakelite' pretenders around it. Hot water, Simichrome, smell and so

  3 min read

• Cameo Identification: Shell, Stone, Lava or Plastic — and Why It Matters

  Every jewelry box has one. Telling hand-carved shell and hardstone cameos from molded glass and plastic, dating by profile and setting, and

  3 min read

• Victorian Jewelry Identification: Mourning, Sentiment and Three Distinct Periods

  Hair lockets, jet parures, snake rings and acrostic gems — decoding the era's symbolic language, the three Victorian periods, and the materi

  3 min read

• Art Deco vs Art Nouveau: Never Confuse Them Again

  Whiplash curves vs machine geometry — two movements twenty years apart that everyone mixes up. The telltale differences across jewelry, glas

  3 min read

• Costume Jewelry Marks: Trifari, Coro, Weiss and the Signatures Worth Money

  The tiny stamp on the clasp can 10× the price. The major makers' marks and eras, the crown-Trifari and patent-number dating tricks, and unsi

  3 min read

• How to Evaluate Inherited Jewelry: The Box-by-Box Triage Method

  A drawer of tangled chains, odd earrings and maybe-treasures. The systematic triage — marks, magnets, materials, makers — that finds the val

  3 min read

• How to Find What Antiques Actually Sell For: The Comps Method

  Asking prices are fiction; sold prices are the market. Where to find real comparables — eBay sold filters, auction archives, price databases

  3 min read

• Antique Appraisals: What They Cost, When You Need One, and How to Choose

  Verbal opinions, written reports, insurance vs fair-market value — the appraisal world explained, with honest costs, the ethics red flags, a

  3 min read

• Provenance: Why a Paper Trail Can Be Worth More Than the Object

  The receipt in the drawer, the label on the back, the letter from 1943 — how documented history multiplies value, what counts as evidence, a

  3 min read

Antique Identifier

Point your camera at any antique, coin, or collectible and get an instant AI appraisal — what it is, its era, and what it's worth.

Download on the App Store