Due to their interesting thermal, mechanical and exchange properties, solid metal or ceramic foams have shown a strong development in numerous technological fields for which the knowledge of their thermal properties is of primary importance. In order to investigate the coupled conductive/radiative heat transfer in this kind of materials, we propose an identification method using thermograms obtained from laser-FLASH measurements. This permits us to evaluate, at ambient and high temperatures, the effective thermal conductivity and two global radiative properties of various metal or ceramic foams, describing the thermal behavior of their equivalent homogeneous semi-transparent materials. This new method of characterization of solid foams is promising since conduction and radiation contributions to heat transfer can be evaluated from a unique experiment. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.