The spark
My interest in flags started the way a lot of niche hobbies do, with a throwaway moment on television. There was a character on The Big Bang Theory who would occasionally fixate on flags with an intensity most people reserve for sports teams or music genres. Instead of dismissing it as a quirk, I found myself curious. Why would someone care so much about rectangles of colored cloth?
That curiosity stuck. I began noticing flags everywhere: outside embassies, in history documentaries, on backpacks at airports. I started learning not just which flag belonged to which country, but why it looked the way it did. A red stripe was no longer just a red stripe, it was a revolution, a river, a cross, or a desert. The more I learned, the more the world felt like a map I was finally learning to read.
The record that changed the goalpost
2:55
Fastest time to identify all national flags
Adam Saeed (Bahrain), 5 August 2023
That is the official benchmark: name every national flag in under three minutes. It sounds absurd until you realize it is mostly a test of pattern recognition and calm under pressure. What struck me was not just the number, but the fact that this record has been broken repeatedly over the years by amateur enthusiasts practicing on their own. That made it feel less like an impossible athletic feat and more like a skill you could actually train.
"If enough ordinary people can train their way to a world record, then the gap between 'interested' and 'good' is just deliberate practice."
From practice to a project
Flaglore began as personal training toward that record. I needed a way to drill every national flag quickly, track my times, and stay motivated. But as I built the first version, it became clear that the same tool could be useful for a much wider audience. Vexillology hobbyists, quiz competitors, Model UN students, and casual learners all need the same thing: a fast, engaging way to connect a flag to its story.
So the Record Attempt page stayed, it is the heartbeat of the project, but the app grew around it. Explore lets you browse the catalog. Quiz turns learning into a game. Facts and sources help you go deeper when a particular emblem catches your attention.
Flaglore was built partly as my own training ground, but it was designed from the start as a tool for anyone who wants to actually know their flags, not just recognize them at a glance.
What to explore next
If you want to test yourself against the same record that inspired the project, head to the Record Attempt page. If you are curious about where the data and images come from, visit Sources.