Seek by iNaturalist

iNaturalist

About this app

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.

Ratings and reviews

It's not perfect, but it works pretty well to identify plants and animals. It's good with distinct features like flowers, but not so good at identifying plants from leaves, bark, etc. It can also be hard to find the right zoom level to use. Still, you have to expect that from ML systems. It's very impressive, and a lot of fun when you're out in nature.

This app used to be pretty good... anymore, though, it rarely can identify anything, and sometimes (I'll do this just to verify it's identification) it will give me different species using virtually the same shot angle of a plant or animal. Once, I had the seek camera open and it snapped a photo of someone's legs and labled it as an alpaca 🤣... that's still quite the joke among us to this day! I'd say this app has maybe a 40-45% accuracy rate when it actually gives an identification.

Not a bad app for identifying plants, insects, and other wildlife, but my experience with the latest version has been less than stellar: the camera functions in the latest version of the app are incredibly laggy compared to previous ones, and it hangs when I try to take a picture.

What's new

- Bug fixes