How to identify fonts in images

There are situations when you want to know the name of an unknown font. You can find it in different ways, but some of the more effective. I am talking about tools created specifically for font identification.

In this article, we review three solutions for fonts identification.

To find out which are the best font, I did the things below:

• Tried solutions that I found on the web
• Asked in places like Reddit, Quora, and forums
• Receive recommendations from designers

By combining the above results, I found out the best three font identifiers: WhatFontIs, MyFonts, FontsNinja.

WhatFontIs

WhatFontIs was created from scratch to be the very best font identifier, being highly easy to use and efficient. With it, you will identify fonts from any image and any website.

Pros

• The software has by far the most extensive database in the industry, with over 790k fonts, both free and paid
• Works with all font foundries, including Google Fonts
• Find with both free and paid fonts
• For each identified font, you get 60+ free and paid font alternatives
• The tool is 100% free to use no matter how many fonts you want to identify
• No registration is required

Cons

• To identify fonts from websites, you have to install the Google Chrome Extension

MyFonts

MyFonts is a fonts distributor with a large font library. It has a simple-to-use font identifier tool named WhatTheFont.

Pros

• Works fast
• Service offers many similar fonts
• Free to use
• Without registration
• You can consult with the online community to find the font

Cons

• This service defines mostly paid fonts
• The online community does not answer all the questions
• Quite a small font database – 130k fonts
• No font identification from websites

Fonts Ninja

FontsNinja is a powerful app and browser extension that will help you identify fonts from websites.

Pros

• Free to use with the browser extension and with the app’s trial version
• You can find a font, their size, letter spacing, line height, and color
• Try fonts on your computer in one click
• Nice interface

Cons

• No font identification from images
• Only 20 fonts in the free trial
• Small database

Real-life test

Now let’s see how to identify fonts using one of these tools. I selected WhatFontIs for this test.

1. Firstly, I was to take a picture of a font. I uploaded it on whatfontis.com.
2. Then I had to optimize the picture a bit: add contrast and turn down the brightness. Also, you can draw lines between letters if they are too close for better results.

Probably with high-quality pictures you can easily skip this step.

3. After that, I cropped the picture and selected the text that I wanted to identify.
4. I insert the characters that the software identified.

Family, I’ve got the following information:

• The name of the font that I wanted to identify
• Price
• Download link
• 60+ free and paid font alternatives for each identified font

The process took me just a few minutes, and I found many other cool fonts.

Conclusions

Selecting a font manually can be very difficult and time-consuming. With the services we reviewed earlier, you can speed up this process and find the font you want in just a few clicks.