This may be obvious to everyone, but it might help a new Numista member:
If you do not know the attribution of a coin, you can type key terms into the Search in the Catalog, and it may filter the options to help you locate the coin listing.
I had a small unattributed Germanic silver coin earlier this evening, for which I could identify that it was 1 kreuzer, and dated 1727. I typed "Kreuzer 1727" for the catalog search, and starting going through the filtered listings. I found a match:
That's what I do as well. Searching through the catalogue is most effective when you have a date, though of course this is not always possible.
The most difficult coins to identify by searching through the Numista catalogue are ancients. They bear no date, are difficult to read for most people, and actually few of them have been entered into the catalogue. The Romans produced thousands of coins and major variants and probably less than 20% of them are in the Numista catalogue.
I would add cash coins to the list; they too are difficult to read (at least for most non-Chinese speakers), and even for people with knowledge of the ideograms there are tons of varieties, just the ones covered in Hartill. Imagine a new user being intimidated by the sheer amount of varieties just on Numista! And a whole bunch of types aren't even on yet (e.g. most of the Republican cash types).
Probably also medieval Islamic coins, Indian ancients, and early Russian coinage as well, but I know less about those.
Early Islamic and ancient Indian coins are actually overall harder to identify than ancient coins. In saying this I disregard the many ancient coins posted in Numista which are so corroded as to make them unidentifiable and worthless.
