Mintdex: World Coin Collection

Every coin in your pocket is a piece of somewhere. Point your camera at it and find out where.

Mintdex identifies real coins and files them into a Dex — a catalogue of 3,082 coin types and 18,725 individual year-and-mint-mark issues, from 25 countries and 26 currencies. You fill it by scanning coins you actually own.

IDENTIFY A COIN FROM A PHOTO Photograph the front and the back. Mintdex reads the country, denomination, year, mint mark and design series, and tells you how confident it is. You confirm before anything enters your collection, so a wrong read is a tap to fix, never a corrupted Dex.

YEAR AND MINT MARK ARE THE WHOLE GAME A 1943 cent and a 1943-D cent are two different finds. Every coin type opens into a grid of every year it was struck and every mint that struck it, with the ones you own filled in. That grid is what turns a jar of change into something with a bottom of the page.

RARITY FROM REAL MINTAGE NUMBERS Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary — computed from how many were actually struck, using published mintage figures for 16,833 of the issues in the catalogue. Not invented, not vibes. Tap any issue and the mintage figure it was derived from is right there.

WHAT IT IS WORTH, AND WHO SAYS SO Tap to see a market value for the exact issue and condition in your hand, sourced from Numista and shown with the date it was published. It appears when you ask for it, and never inside the app's own verdict on whether a coin is worth keeping — that judgement is built from mintage, condition and what is still missing from your Dex, never from money.

THE COMMEMORATIVES PEOPLE ACTUALLY COLLECT 1,946 circulating commemoratives are catalogued as types in their own right — the 2 euro commemoratives, the US state and America the Beautiful quarters. A 2007 Treaty of Rome is not an ordinary 2007 2 euro, and Mintdex knows the difference.

CONDITION, HONESTLY Coins are graded into five plain bands, from Well Worn to Mint. Deliberately coarse: automated grading is not accurate enough to put a number on, so Mintdex does not pretend otherwise. Find a cleaner copy of a coin you already have and it upgrades the one in your Dex.

THE MONEY THAT DOESN'T EXIST ANYMORE Francs, marks, pesetas, lira, escudos, guilders, schillings, drachmas, markkaa, Irish pounds. Eleven currencies that were replaced by the euro are in the catalogue, with their real mintages. The drawer at your parents' house is full of them.

YOURS, ON YOUR PHONE Your collection is a file on your device. Mintdex works with the network off, the whole catalogue browses offline, and a home screen widget shows how many finds and how many countries you are up to. Sign in with Apple if you want a backup that survives a lost phone — nothing is gated behind it, and it asks nothing of you but the sign-in. Sharing a find with the worldwide map, and sending scan photographs back to improve identification, are both switches in Settings that you can turn off.

Whether you have a jar of holiday change, a shoebox of your grandfather's coins, or you just want to know what the thing in your pocket actually is — start your Dex. It is free.