How to identify a crane manufacturer from boom shape and silhouette
Anyone who has tried to build a crane inventory from photos alone knows the nameplate is the one thing you never get a clean shot of. What you do get, from a chart overlay, a drone pass, or a satellite tile, is the outline. The good news: boom geometry and machine house shape carry a surprising amount of manufacturer signal, if you know what to look for.
Boom shape: the first tell
Start with the boom type. A twin-lift boom, the kind that splits into two parallel booms side by side to handle two 20-foot boxes or one 40, shows up on a lot of newer ZPMC-built ship-to-shore cranes ordered for high-throughput berths. A single rigid box boom with a rope trolley running underneath is a more generic profile shared across several makers, so boom type alone narrows the field, it doesn't close it.
Look next at the backreach, the short tail section behind the landside legs. Cranes built for double-trolley operation, with a portal crane or shuttle carrier working the backreach independently of the main trolley, will show a longer, often slightly different-profile tail section than a single-trolley machine. Liebherr's mobile harbor cranes are the easy exception here: the pedestal-mounted slewing boom and lattice structure look nothing like a rail-mounted STS, so if you're scanning a terminal photo and see a slewing crane on a circular base rather than a gantry on rails, you've already got your maker-family narrowed to the mobile/harbor-mobile segment rather than the big-box STS makers.
The A-frame versus single-pylon portal is the other boom-adjacent tell worth logging. A-frame legs, the kind that form a triangle when viewed from the waterside, spread load differently than a single vertical pylon and tend to correlate with specific eras and yards of construction more than with one brand exclusively. Treat it as a secondary confirming feature, not a standalone fingerprint.
Machine house and operator cab silhouette
Once the boom's logged, move to the machine house, the boxy structure sitting atop the portal that holds the hoist machinery. This is where cab placement does a lot of the talking. A cab that rides the trolley and travels the full length of the boom reads differently in a side-on photo than a fixed cab mounted on the machine house itself. Fixed-cab layouts tend to produce a cleaner, more rectangular machine house profile; trolley-riding cabs leave the machine house itself more utilitarian and boxy, with the operator glass visible out on the boom instead.
Konecranes-built RTGs and RMGs in the yard show a different but related tell: the machine house on a yard crane sits lower and wider relative to span than an STS house does, and the gantry legs show rubber-tired bogies on an RTG versus rail wheels on an RMG. That distinction tells you crane class before it tells you maker, but class is half the inventory question anyway.
Paint scheme and livery help confirm once geometry has done the narrowing. Terminal operators repaint cranes to house colors, so livery is not a maker signal on its own. But a consistent boom-and-house combination repeated across several cranes at the same berth, photographed over successive years, tends to confirm a single order lot and a single maker even when none of the photos show a nameplate.
None of these tells work in isolation. A twin-lift boom plus a trolley-riding cab plus an A-frame portal is a stronger combination than any one feature alone, and the honest answer on a given crane is sometimes "likely," not "confirmed." Attribution without a site visit is a photogrammetry and pattern-matching exercise, not a guarantee, and any inventory worth building should flag the ones that stay ambiguous rather than force a guess.
That silhouette logic is exactly what sits behind the terminal-by-terminal crane inventory Crane Fleet Mapping builds: count, type, and maker attribution where the imagery supports it, refreshed every year. If your spreadsheet has more question marks than manufacturer names in it, that's the gap worth closing first.