Seek by iNaturalist 4+

Identify plants & animals

iNaturalist, LLC

    • Free

Screenshots

Description

Use the power of image recognition technology to identify the plants and animals all around you. Earn badges for seeing different types of plants, birds, fungi and more!

• Get outside and point the Seek Camera at living things
• Identify wildlife, plants, and fungi and learn about the organisms all around you
• Earn badges for observing different types of species and participating in challenges

OPEN THE CAMERA AND START SEEKING!

Found a mushroom, flower, or bug, and not sure what it is? Open up the Seek Camera to see if it knows!

Drawing from millions of wildlife observations on iNaturalist, Seek shows you lists of commonly recorded insects, birds, plants, amphibians, and more in your area. Scan the environment with the Seek Camera to identify organisms using the tree of life. Add different species to your observations and learn all about them in the process! The more observations you make, the more badges you’ll earn!

This is a great app for families who want to spend more time exploring nature together, and for anyone who wants to learn more about the life all around them.

KID-SAFE

Seek does not require registration and does not collect any user data by default. Some user data will be collected if you choose to sign in with an iNaturalist account, but you must be over 13 or have your parents permission to do so.

Seek will ask permission to turn on location services, but your location is obscured to respect your privacy while still allowing species suggestions from your general area. Your precise location is never stored in the app or sent to iNaturalist unless you sign in to your iNaturalist account and submit your observations.

Our image recognition technology is based on observations submitted to iNaturalist.org and partner sites, and identified by the iNaturalist community.

Seek is part of iNaturalist, a not-for-profit organization. Seek was made by the iNaturalist team with support from the California Academy of Sciences, the National Geographic Society, Our Planet on Netflix, WWF, HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, and Visipedia.

What’s New

Version 2.15.7

A new monthly challenge is available

Ratings and Reviews

4.8 out of 5
29.9K Ratings

29.9K Ratings

Kaiaim ,

Utterly addictive but much in need of improvement

I simply can’t stop doing this. That said there are a lot of issues. The other reviews have pointed many of these out so I’m gonna focus on the one that bothers me the most and that should be the easiest to fix, the photo management. It should be possible to import a picture into the app so you don’t have to keep interacting with your camera roll. I often have to take five or six pictures of a single thing to get a recognition, and of course often I don’t get any at all. As a result my photo roll is extremely cluttered. However it’s hard to delete the ones that are not usable because you have to toggle back-and-forth between this app and the photo roll and try to recall which of five or six very similar pictures you can delete. The net result is I usually end up deleting one that was recognizable. It would also be nice if you could look from the app into a folder or album on the photo roll so as to keep these pictures separate from your regular photo stream. It would also be great if you could replace the first picture you took of something with a later better picture. I look forward to future integrations

Developer Response ,

Hi Kaiaim, thank you for your feedback. We added the ability to backup photo thumbnails into the most recent release (2.3.1). So from now on, any photos you take should appear in the app's observation list even if you delete them from your camera roll.

PicFlkr ,

Really love the app but I have issues sometimes

Sometimes the app auto scans things while I'm trying to scan something else and by the time I get whatever pop-up out of the way (same observation or challenge complete, etc) the thing I was actually trying to scan goes away into the wild :( other times I try to scan something 1ft from me, getting multiple angles and still no scan, it just stays on the second to last bubble never able to get the final result. I know what the species is too because I see it on the home page at the location I'm at. It would be nice to just go "okay you can't scan this, I'll just upload the picture I got and set it to this species" or at least have a way to let you pick it if it looks similar to one you're labeling it as. The species I've had that issue with is the Great-Tailed Grackle. I've been scanning different ones for 4 days now and still haven't been able to get Seek to get it but have the most clear picture of one. Sometimes the animals are super well camouflaged too and Seek just can't see them at all. It's frustrating sometimes but overall the app has been working fine and has had no problems. Plants work more compared to animals it seems. Can't really get bugs like ticks and mosquitos, but I guess I can blame my camera for that one. iPhone 12. This review would be 5 stars if it wasn't for those small issues I have. All in all amazing app and I use it all the time now.

Person that didn't do this ,

Ok, but needs improvement

This app is pretty good, but it does need a lot of work. I downloaded Seek after iNaturalist, because I wanted an app that immediately identifies the species for you instead of having to wait for others on the app to do it. I really like the concept, but it does have some bugs that need fixing. First, the database that identifies species needs to be cleaned up. The picture has to be very clear for it to be identified, otherwise it won’t work. Once when I took a picture of a moth in bad lighting, it identified it as a species I knew it very clearly wasn’t, and there was no way for me to change it. Also the camera in the app won’t let you zoom in, so I have to take a picture with my phone’s camera and then input the picture in the app. Lastly, I wish the app tracked specifically how many of each kind of organism you find (reptiles, mammals, etc). It will reward you when you reach a milestone of 5, 15, etc. finds, but it doesn’t tell you anywhere how many of each you have. It has the overall total of organisms, but it doesn’t list something like, “you have 11 mammals, only 4 more to go till your next achievement!” But despite all the bugs, it is a pretty cool app in theory. I like how it awards badges for certain numbers of organisms found, that’s a fun idea. I do get annoyed when it won’t accurately identify species sometimes, but I’ll keep using it and hopefully it will improve.

App Privacy

The developer, iNaturalist, LLC, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.

Data Linked to You

The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:

  • Location
  • User Content

Data Not Linked to You

The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:

  • Location

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

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