Upload a picture of any board, bench, or wall and get the species and the likely thermal treatment in about a second. Purpose-built for sauna woods and expanded with Thermory BIM texture training — spruce, aspen, alder, hemlock, western red cedar, thermo magnolia, ash, pine, oak, and black Ignite spruce — using combined grain + color analysis.
Drop in a photo of the wood — a single board works best, but a whole sauna interior works too. You’ll always get a best guess, an honest certainty score, and specific directions to sharpen the identification.
JPEG, PNG, or WebP · phone camera photos welcome · works on whole-sauna shots
Analyzed on your device — never uploadedTip: in a full sauna shot, the benches and the walls are often different woods — select each one separately for two identifications.
A fast labeling game built from the 43 real Thermory texture files in the Ignite Spruce cladding pack. Play with multiple choice, then switch to no-help mode when you want the harder round.
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These are the 17 profiles the identifier is calibrated on — the original sauna woods plus Thermory materials extracted from the supplied BIM texture files and material library. Learn what each looks like so you can sanity-check any result yourself.
Populus tremula
Nearly white with a satin sheen, almost invisible grain, and no knots — the palest wood in any sauna.
A low-scent hardwood that stays comfortable to the touch at sauna temperatures, which is why it’s the classic choice for benches, backrests, and headrests.
Populus tremula, heat-treated
Uniform caramel brown, silky-smooth and knot-free — like aspen dipped in toffee.
Aspen baked in a low-oxygen kiln: darker, more dimensionally stable, and more moisture-resistant. A premium choice for benches and modern interiors.
Picea abies
Creamy pale yellow with frequent small dark knots and clearly visible growth-ring stripes.
The traditional Nordic sauna wall wood — a light softwood with a mild resinous scent and lively knot character.
Picea abies, heat-treated
Toasty golden-brown with dark knots still showing through the roast — knotty character in a deeper tone.
Heat-treated spruce: the familiar knotty Nordic look shifted to warm honey-brown, with improved stability and moisture resistance.
Alnus glutinosa
Light honey color with a distinct pink-apricot undertone, subtle grain, and the occasional tiny pin knot.
A Baltic sauna favorite — a low-resin hardwood that handles heat gracefully, widely used for benches and wall paneling.
Alnus glutinosa, heat-treated
Warm chestnut brown — noticeably deeper than thermo aspen — with fine, quiet grain.
Alder heat-treated to a rich chestnut brown; smooth, low-resin, and a staple of dark modern sauna design.
Alnus glutinosa, intense heat treatment
Deep espresso brown, nearly chocolate — the darkest wood used in saunas.
Alder given a longer, hotter thermal treatment for a dramatic near-chocolate finish used in high-end sauna interiors.
Tsuga heterophylla
Even light tan with calm, straight grain and very few knots — quieter than spruce, tanner than aspen.
A smooth, stable North American softwood with minimal scent — popular in traditional and infrared sauna cabins alike.
Thuja plicata
Red-brown with dramatic contrast striping — tones swing from pale salmon to chocolate, often on the same wall — plus an unmistakable sweet aroma.
The iconic North American sauna and hot-tub wood: naturally decay-resistant, aromatic, and bold, with the widest color variation of any sauna wood.
Magnolia spp., heat-treated
Dark roasted brown with quiet, even grain — smoother and less red than dark thermo alder.
Calibrated from Thermory SHP and STS10 thermo magnolia BIM textures. It can sit close to thermo ash by color, so grain smoothness matters.
Fraxinus spp., heat-treated
Dark cocoa-brown Thermory ash with open, visible grain and little knot character.
Trained from Thermory ash cladding, decking, porch-flooring, and PaCS texture files. It is darker and less golden than cedar or pine.
Picea spp., Thermory Kodiak profile
Warm roasted softwood, often orange-brown, with profile-dependent grain contrast.
Thermory Kodiak spruce sits close to pine and western red cedar in photos. The model includes its cladding and decking texture variants.
Pinus spp., heat-treated
Warm brown pine, usually smoother and more uniform than cedar, with some profiles showing strong linear striping.
Calibrated from the Thermory C19 cladding and pine decking textures. It overlaps strongly with Kodiak spruce, so certainty may drop on softwood photos.
Pinus radiata
Medium brown clear-pine texture with bold profile striping in some Thermory cladding boards.
The Thermory texture pack labels these as Radiata Pine/ClearPine cladding profiles. Several variants can imitate cedar by color alone.
Quercus rubra
Dark brown smooth red oak with quieter color than cedar and warmer grain than thermo ash.
Trained from the Thermory Benchmark Series red oak brown smooth cladding texture in the BIM library.
Picea spp., black finish
Near-black brushed or dragon-scale spruce from Thermory’s Rebel Series Ignite textures.
This is a black surface finish rather than normal bare-wood color. The classifier reports it separately and keeps confidence conservative on very dark photos.
The broader Wood Database model covers 589 species from 8,480 privately processed training images. The source photos stay private; this list is built from derived anchors and species facts only.
Color gets you 80% of the way; grain and knots settle the rest. This is the same logic the identifier uses.
| Wood | Swatch | Typical color | Grain | Knots | Quick tell |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aspen | Near-white, faint cream | Almost invisible | None | The palest, smoothest board in the room | |
| Spruce | Creamy pale yellow | Visible stripes | Frequent, dark | Pale + knotty = spruce | |
| Hemlock | Even light tan | Straight, calm | Very few | Like spruce without the knots, one shade tanner | |
| Alder | Honey with pink-apricot cast | Subtle, fine | Occasional pin knots | The pink undertone gives it away | |
| Western Red Cedar | Salmon to chocolate red-brown | Bold, high-contrast | Few | Wild board-to-board color swings + sweet aroma | |
| Thermo Aspen | Uniform caramel brown | Almost invisible | None | Perfectly even toffee tone, silky surface | |
| Thermo Spruce | Toasty golden brown | Visible stripes | Frequent, dark | Brown + knotty = thermo spruce | |
| Thermo Alder | Warm chestnut brown | Fine, quiet | Occasional | Deeper than thermo aspen, calmer than cedar | |
| Dark Thermo Alder | Deep espresso, near-chocolate | Fine, quiet | Occasional | The darkest sauna wood, full stop | |
| Thermo Magnolia | Dark roasted brown | Quiet, smooth | None | Darker and smoother than most alder/aspen profiles | |
| Thermory Ash | Cocoa brown | Open, visible | Few | Dark like thermo magnolia, but grainier | |
| Kodiak Spruce | Roasted orange-brown | Profile-dependent | Few | Looks close to pine/cedar; confidence may be moderate | |
| Thermory Pine | Warm brown | Linear striping | Few | Smoother than cedar, very close to Kodiak spruce | |
| Radiata Pine | Medium brown | Sometimes bold | Few | ClearPine profiles can mimic cedar by color | |
| Red Oak | Dark brown smooth finish | Warm, subtle | Few | Oak warmth without cedar’s red swing | |
| Ignite Spruce | Near-black | Brushed or scaled | Hidden | Black Thermory Ignite finish, not normal bare wood |
Generic wood apps guess from overall color alone. This identifier was built for one hard problem — telling sauna woods and their thermal treatments apart — so it reads the wood the way an experienced builder does.
Your photo is converted to the perceptual CIELAB color space, the same one used in color science. The engine reads lightness, redness, and yellowness of the wood surface — robust medians, not averages that glare and shadows can skew — and checks for the gray/tan desaturation of sun-weathered siding before relying on fresh-board color.
Color alone can’t split thermo aspen from thermo spruce. So the engine also measures grain-line contrast and direction, surface uniformity, and scans for dark knots — the signature that separates knotty spruce from silky aspen at any roast level.
Your photo’s signature is compared against calibrated sauna profiles and learned Thermory texture anchors. You get the best match, the species and treatment probabilities, the runner-ups — and a certainty score that drops when the photo quality limits the evidence, with concrete directions to fix it.
Depth over breadth. An app that claims to know 10,000 species is spreading thin evidence across all of them. This engine is calibrated deeply on sauna woods and Thermory materials — including thermal treatments and product finishes that generic identifiers don’t model cleanly. Ask a generic app about a thermo aspen bench and it sees “some brown tropical hardwood.” Ask this one and it sees the roast.
Private and instant by design. The full analysis — dozens of color and texture measurements — runs in your browser in under a second. No upload, no queue, no account, no photo ever leaving your device.
Honest about uncertainty. Every answer carries a certainty score, the species and treatment probabilities with the leading runner-ups, and specific steps to improve the shot. An identifier that never admits doubt is just a random-answer generator with confidence.
The identifier runs a computer-vision analysis directly in your browser. It measures the wood’s surface color in the perceptual CIELAB color space, checks for low-chroma gray or tan weathering from sun exposure, then analyzes texture: grain-line contrast, surface uniformity, and dark knots (grain direction is measured too, to judge photo quality for the certainty score). Those measurements are compared against calibrated sauna profiles plus learned Thermory texture anchors, and every result includes a certainty score plus concrete tips to improve the identification.
It gives a deep calibrated sauna/Thermory answer first: spruce, thermally modified spruce, aspen, thermally modified aspen, alder, thermally modified alder, dark thermo alder, hemlock, western red cedar, thermo magnolia, Thermory ash, Kodiak spruce, Thermory pine, radiata pine, red oak, and Ignite spruce. It also ranks broader Wood Database leads across 589 learned species from 8,480 privately processed training images.
Yes. The Thermory texture challenge uses the real texture files from the supplied Ignite Spruce cladding package. You can play in multiple-choice mode or no-help mode, and the answers use the same reviewed labels as the classifier.
Yes, it is completely free, and no account, sign-up, or email is required. Upload a photo and get an answer in about a second.
No. The entire analysis runs on your own device, in your browser. Your photo is never uploaded, stored, or sent to any server. If you choose to rate a result, only non-image classifier metadata and your optional correction are sent for human review.
Photograph dry, bare, unfinished wood in soft natural daylight, straight-on from about arm’s length, with the flash off. Fill the frame with a single board so grain lines and any knots are sharp. If the photo shows a whole room, drag a selection box over one board to analyze just that area.
It will always give you its best guess, and it does model sun-faded/weathered bare wood. Coatings are different: they change the two strongest identification signals, color and grain contrast. The tool cannot reliably detect coatings, so it can be confidently wrong here — a wet or oiled board often reads as thermally modified (any result that lands on a thermo wood carries a reminder about this), and stain can imitate another species entirely. A photo of a dry, bare patch, protected underside, board end, or freshly sanded corner gives a far more reliable answer.
Thermally modified (or heat-treated) wood is baked at roughly 160–230°C in a low-oxygen kiln. The process caramelizes the wood sugars, turning the board brown throughout, and makes it more dimensionally stable and moisture-resistant — ideal for saunas. The stronger the treatment, the darker the wood: that’s the difference between thermo alder and dark thermo alder.
The identifier always answers with the closest match among the woods it knows, and the certainty score tells you how well your photo actually fits. If the deep sauna/Thermory confidence is low, check the broader Wood Database leads for species outside the sauna set. Coatings, wet surfaces, and poor lighting can still hide the bare wood signature.
Only the intensity of the heat treatment. Thermo alder is roasted to a warm chestnut brown; dark thermo alder gets a longer, hotter treatment that takes it to a deep espresso, near-chocolate tone. Side by side against a sheet of white paper in daylight, the difference is unmistakable.
Because an honest identifier should tell you when it’s sure and when it’s guessing. The percentage reflects both how closely your photo matches the winning wood profile and the quality of the photo itself (lighting, glare, how much of the frame is actually bare wood). Every result also includes specific steps to raise that certainty.