You overlooked books. There are plenty of books available to ID cacti, available online through Amazon, for example. Also check out your local library, and new and used bookstores.

Christopher

I find that this Cactiguide.com site is a good one to get started looking for something on.. Half way down the page it has a "Identifying by cactus habit" , and then it is nose to the grindstone checking things out till you find what you are looking for. One can also do it by family. I do not always find their picture spot on because their is a lot of variation with in the pictures. I will then take a name and google it, go to the images and search further. This is often very boring and tedious if you are looking for immediate gratification.

two days ago, I was looking for a astragalus species (3 - 4thousand in the astragalus family ) and all I had was a speckled seed pod and a location. No picture of the plant till afterwards . It took me about 6 hours but I got it .

I did that differently. I went to the LBJ wildflower site and went through their 6 pages of astragalus in their database and looked for ones that their description mentioned New Mexico, and then went to the Gov. database linked on their page and it has map of the ranges (since I knew where it was collected) and the map can zero in to county distributions. If the right county or one close by was mentioned, I then googled images (also linked on the LBJ site) of that species to see if they had photos of the seed pod. I was lucky that it was a very distinctive seed pod. I did this with all the species that were from central New Mexico. I think there were over 20-30. It was Astragalus lentiginosus douglas ex hooker var diphysis. I sent the info to the woman who gave me the seed (NOT the woman who collected it). She sent me a photo of the plant after the fact that she got from the collector and I was right! I really felt I deserved a pat on my back. I was then able to find a photo of a population a couple miles from the collectors house and it was an exact match. I sent the info to the collector. It was a hard ID but it sure feels good to do it right.

Keep your eye out for different Databases. You will get the hang of it if you just try to do a bit of detective work.

Here is a link that might be useful: Cactiguide.com habit search

Here's something by the same people but for succulents.

Here is a link that might be useful: Succulentguide.com

Here is a good site for IDing opuntias. I remember that you had one on here before.

Here is a link that might be useful: Opuntiads of the USA and other places

Thank you all, great advice. So I have been starting with looking at it. I have an echinopsis without a tag so been looking for that. And I have been looking at named ones I have and looking for almost identical looks and parts. So with a few there is a few similarities but it's not that simple.

Any good books you can recommend? Also my library small very little content of use to me.

No, it is not that simple and it gets more complicated the more you dig.

Yes it is getting harder the more I g, I didn't know stapelia isn't a cacti

There, you learned something already. as for books , the specialized books are better than the generalized succulent books. If you are interested in stapeliads get a book on them. In time, to will have a better library. Till then , go to the library