About Lithico
What it is
Lithico is a camera-based identification app for rocks, crystals and minerals. Point your camera at a specimen and it returns a shortlist of candidates, each with its own confidence score, plus a full profile for whichever one you land on — hardness, chemical formula, streak, where it forms, and why it matters. When a photo alone can't settle it, Lithico walks you through hands-on tests — streak, hardness, acid reaction, magnetism — using things you probably already have at home.
It also holds a field guide covering the rocks and minerals you're most likely to find, a place to log a personal collection with notes and dates, and clearly labelled crystal-lore content kept separate from the geology.
Why honesty about photo limits is the product
A photo is a good first guess, not a lab result. Colour shifts with lighting, similar minerals can look identical from one angle, and some identifications genuinely need a hardness scratch or an acid test to separate. Lithico never rounds that uncertainty up into a single confident-sounding answer: every result is one of three honest outcomes.
- Confirmed — one candidate stands clearly apart, shown with its confidence score.
- Narrowed — the tests you ran rule enough out to leave a short set that nothing left can split further. That's treated as a real result, not a failure.
- Inconclusive — stated plainly, along with what was ruled out and where to take it from here, rather than forced into a guess.
That refusal to round uncertainty up to false confidence is the whole design principle behind Lithico, not a footnote. It's also why the app never quotes a made-up accuracy percentage, never claims to beat any other app, and never tells you what a specimen is "worth" — a camera can't know that, and pretending otherwise isn't honest.
Who builds it
Lithico is built by one person in Australia, not a company. That's also the reason the honesty commitments above are enforceable rather than marketing copy — there's no team of stakeholders to argue for rounding a number up. If something in the app doesn't live up to that, email pfolvig@gmail.com and it gets read directly, by the person who wrote the code.
Read more
Privacy policy — what a scan uploads, what's optional, and how to delete or export your data.