Flags of the world: search by colour and download

Tick the colours in the “Find a flag” block. Flags made of exactly those come first — red and white gives Poland, Indonesia, Monaco, Japan, Qatar and about twenty more. Underneath, as a separate group, are the flags where those colours appear among others. Colours are measured from the real pixels with their share of the area, so a small detail in a coat of arms does not make a flag “yellow”.

Because the Russian flag also has blue. The top group holds flags made of exactly the ticked colours, which is how the question “which country has a red and white flag” is usually meant. Russia, France and the United States land in the second group, “these colours among others”, right below it.

512 pixels is enough for an icon or a list, 1024 for a slide, 2048 for a printed page, 4096 for large print and editing. If you do not know the size yet, take the SVG: it is vector and stays sharp at any scale.

Because they are different in life. Each country fixes its proportions in law: 3:2 for Russia and Germany, 2:1 for the United Kingdom, 1:1 for Switzerland and Vatican City, 28:11 for Qatar, 19:10 for the United States, 7:10 for Brazil. The set holds 30 distinct ratios in all. Icon collections fit everything into one 4:3 frame, which is where the impression that flags are all the same shape comes from. Here the ratio is read from the flag's own vector file.

Yes — it is the only national flag in current use with that shape, two pennons one above the other, and it is taller than it is wide. The tool treats it that way: the cut-away corners carry no mass and catch no wind, so the cloth behaves like the real thing rather than like a rectangle with transparent edges.

For a still, choose the "Transparent" background and download the PNG frame, or take the ready-made flag from the block below — those PNG and SVG files come with transparency already. A video file carries no transparency at all here, in any browser, because the encoder is not asked to write it. For editing, take a PNG sequence or a chroma key.

Not every program reads transparent video, while a green or blue background can be keyed out in any editor. On those backgrounds the tool drops the coloured bounce light, otherwise the flag keeps a green rim that the keyer then eats into.

It is the Beaufort scale — the same one used to read wind off a flag. Force 0: the cloth hangs. Force 2–3 (about 3–5 m/s): a light flag lifts off the pole. Force 4–5 (7–10 m/s): it flaps along its whole length. Force 6 and above (12 m/s and more): fully extended. Past roughly 15 m/s a real flag stops changing in appearance, and so does this one.

The gusts are built from harmonics whose period divides the clip length exactly, so the air in the last frame is identical to the air in the first. Cloth is chaotic, so its position is additionally blended across a short stretch. The join is invisible and the video can be looped.

Yes, and that is the point of the control. The material sets the weight of a square metre, and weight decides at what wind the flag will rise: nylon at 85 g/m² extends from about 1.7 m/s, ordinary polyester flag cloth at 155 g/m² from 2.2, heavy outdoor cloth at 250 g/m² only from 2.9. The same goes for shine: satin gives a highlight, cotton absorbs it.

They are computed from the rendered flag image — from real pixels, with each colour's share of the area. That is more reliable than reading fills out of the vector: a flag with a coat of arms can carry dozens of them, and none is the flag's colour.

Flags of international organisations — the United Nations, European Union, NATO, African Union, ASEAN, Arab League, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Commonwealth of Independent States, Eurasian Economic Union, Commonwealth of Nations, La Francophonie, UNESCO, WHO — and several historical ones: the Soviet Union, Russian SFSR, Russian Empire, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, Byzantium, the Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Italy.

The preview runs on the graphics card and adapts to the device. The export is solved separately and does not depend on how many frames the preview managed — on a slow machine the file comes out the same, it just takes longer to build. A 10-second 4K clip takes from half a minute to a few minutes.