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Some stamps are easy to look up: a year, a value, a name printed in the design. Many are not — a portrait with no caption, one value from a long definitive series, a stamp off an old cover with nothing to go on. Now you can show the catalog the stamp instead of describing it.

Open the India catalog and the search box has two new buttons: one takes a photo with your camera, the other picks a picture you already have. The matches take the place of the list, closest first, each showing how sure the match is, and each one opens its catalog entry. If you would rather start from the photograph, Identify a stamp is a page that does only this.

A match is a suggestion, not a verdict. Open the entry and check it against your copy before you record it; searching never adds anything to your collection on its own. Your photograph is used for that one search and is not kept.

For the closest match, photograph one stamp at a time, filling the frame, on a plain background in even light. JPEG, PNG and WebP pictures up to 10 MB are accepted.

Photo search is part of a membership, and that includes the one-time 30-day free trial. It covers the India catalog, the catalog open today.

Curate your passions.

Explore opened with three guides: on stamps, on coins and banknotes, and on perfume and attar. Twenty more are now complete, so every hobby the section lists has a book of its own.

Collecting adds trading cards, comics, vintage toys, memorabilia, antiques and gadgets. The outdoors gains hiking, gardening and birdwatching. The arts add painting — which also covers collecting art and prints — photography and crafts. Music adds playing an instrument and composing, sport adds chess, cricket and athletics, and digital hobbies add video games, programming and blogging.

Each guide covers the hobby itself, from first steps to specialist detail, and the story of that hobby in India, and ends with a glossary and further reading.

Every one also carries a long section on storage and preservation: what damages the things you keep, what the Indian climate does to them, which materials to use and which to avoid, and a routine to follow. For a collection that is often the part that matters most.

Together the twenty run to about 380,000 words, and the whole section to more than half a million.

As with the first three, the text is complete and the illustrations are still being sourced, so you will meet labelled slots where pictures belong. You do not need an account and there is nothing to buy.

Explore is for the hobby, not the software. It opens on hobbies in general — what makes something a hobby, where the idea came from, what it gives back, and the families they fall into — and then goes as far into any one of them as you care to follow.

Three guides are complete, and they are books rather than articles. Philately & the Indian Story runs from the anatomy of a stamp and the Penny Black through to the Mughal dak, the Scinde Dawk, the 1854 inverted head and the Indian States. Coins and Notes covers how coins are struck and notes are printed, how to grade and identify both, and the whole story of Indian money from punch-marked karshapanas to the Reserve Bank. Essence is on perfume and attar — the materials, the anatomy of a formula, and the deg-bhapka stills still working in Kannauj. Together they run to more than 130,000 words.

You do not need an account and there is nothing to buy. The whole section is public, and it is meant to be readable start to finish or dipped into at the part you already care about.

The guides are text-complete; their illustrations are still being sourced, so you will meet labelled slots where pictures belong. The diagrams that could be drawn — the anatomy of a stamp, the Indian watermark sequence, the deg-bhapka apparatus — are already in place.

More hobbies are named in each family and will open as they are written.

It doesn't show yours — the margins on your copy, the cancellation that landed just so, the corner that isn't quite right. Every collector knows the difference. Until now the record held everything about your copy except what it looks like.

Studio closes that. Open any stamp, sheet, miniature sheet, cover or brochure you own, and each acquisition record can carry your own image alongside the date, the cost and the condition — the way a real stockbook works, with the copy actually in it. One row, one copy, one image. If you own several copies and want an image of each, record them as separate rows with a quantity of 1.

They stay yours. Every image is served over a signed link bound to your account, and community and showcase surfaces never carry them — the collection you share is still the collection you chose to share. Location and camera details are stripped as the image is saved, deliberately: a collection is a map of valuables in your home.

If Studio ever ends, nothing is deleted straight away: your images become read-only, then stop being shown, and you can download them at any point in that window. Renewing brings them back.

Be clear about what we keep. Your image is converted and resized when it's saved, and the original file isn't kept — so keep your own copy. The archive you can download is a backup of your collection, not of your originals: it carries the converted images this site stores, together with every record they belong to, as a single file you can keep.

Studio comes in three sizes, and your account page shows how much of your level you've used. Levels go up, not down; if you're already on Standard, nothing is lost by moving up mid-term, because your remaining time carries over.

Curate your passions.

Every collection starts with one piece. Then it grows — albums, envelopes, spreadsheets, a box in the cupboard. You know what you have. Mostly. MyHobbies is where it comes back into order.

We're opening with Philately. At its centre is a meticulously curated, versioned India stamp catalog — a reference you can actually trust. Beside it sits your collection: everything you own, with what you paid, when, the condition it's in, and its full history. And around both, a community of people who get it.

Stamps are first, not last. MyHobbies is built as one account for every hobby, and more modules will follow.

To celebrate the launch, every yearly plan is 50% off for your first year — the offer runs from 15 August to 15 September 2026 and is applied automatically at checkout, no code needed.

Joining is free, and every account can start a one-time 30-day trial of the full Catalog + Collection experience — no credit card required. Come look around: myhobbies.in. Curate your passions.