How To Quickly Find The Year A Stamp Was Issued?

I'm collecting worldwide stamps, and I print my album pages using Stamp Albums Web. All works well if I know a stamp's year of issue, but the other day I wanted to mount a green Japan definitive showing a songbird. It appeared to be 1970s to 1990s. I spent a long time trying to find it in my paper Scott catalog, and I never did find it; there were just too many bird images, and the black-and-white photos didn't help. My main time-consumer is trying to find year info on my unmounted stamps so I know which album page to mount it in or to print.

The digital Scotts would be great, but quite expensive for worldwide use. I'm thinking of some other software for such searches. Do any worldwide collectors out there have some tips for this problem?

Depending on how good your French is, Yvert does a worldwide digital catalogue @€129 - don't know how that compares with Scott. You could also look out for cheap copies of older, paper catalogues on ebay - Gibbons's Stamps of the World is a simplified worldwide catalogue.

Use a online image search (sometimes called a reverse image search). It is quick, easy, and finds most stamps in seconds. Here are instructions https://stampsmarter.org/learning/H...eSearch.html
Don

One of the problems with Scott is that only a few stamps are actually imaged. Stampworld has a catalog illustrating virtually all stamps, which should help you find the year quickly.

https://www.stampworld.com/en/maps/Asia/?

I use the Stamp Identifier app on my iPhone - available in the App Store. It works amazingly well, successful over 90% of the time. It's easy to use, just point the camera. I strongly recommend using a black background.

Typically you just point your camera at the stamp and up pops a gallery of pictures to choose from. Sometimes the user will need to actually click and crop. Once the user chooses a possible match it will provide the country, year and catalog numbers from several different different catalogs.

A user can also upload a picture from their photo album. So a user can save pictures from the internet, then use this app to identify the stamp

There will always be issues with close varieties, colors, overprints, and strong cancelations. In the end, it saves me a ton of time.

Gosh - Did not know that existed. Will have to check it out. Thanks!

GoshKruse. That is a great app. Thanks for showing.

Consider this your apprenticeship, as a World wide collector.
(Not many of us left)

The really difficult, you can post on this forum for ID.
Another option is to go to ebay, and search for "Japan" place the stamp value, and any other avail info, and see if it pops up there.

Japan is a general toughie for Identification, make sure your stamp is not a "Prefecture" that increases the difficulty.

My database came up with 25 "birds"
There is a green "Cuckoo" bird at Scott 598 and 1067 (3 yen)

Thanks so much, folks, for your responses. I tried GoshKruse's recommendation for the Stamp Identifier smartphone app, and it worked perfectly. Now, all I have to do is find that darned Japan stamp, take a photo, and albumize it.

WWW, would it not help if you post a picture of your stamp?


Peter

Helo.
At the UPU Congress in 1974 it was agreed that all stamps would have the year of their issuance written.
Not all countries do, despite having agreed.
Regards.

You can also go directly to the camera icon on the google phone app and take a picture of the stamp. It will search for a picture of your stamp without your having to upload it.