Limitations of flame photometry:

The limitations of the techniques involve the following.

• The low temperature of the natural gas and air flame limits a method to simply ionized metals. The method is selective by restricted towards easily excitable alkali and alkaline earth metals.
• The low flame temperatures render this method susceptible to certain drawback, most of them related to interference and the stability of the flame and aspiration conditions.
• That will tells us nothing about the molecular form of the metal within the original sample.
• Just liquid samples could be used. In some cases, lengthy steps are essential to prepare liquid samples.