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 a cool app, but it'll give me the incorrect species 25% of the time. It told me that a bug with a very specific marking that set it apart as something completely different was a paper wasp, which looked nothing alike. The quality of the camera through the app is SO bad that it is basically unusable. I have to take a normal picture of everything and send it through the app if I am photographing anything small, which I often am because I always want to know what spider is in my house.

Sometimes after taking a photo the app seems to get stuck with a spinning buffer symbol and you have to try again, frustrating if you managed to capture a difficult subject. I think the app would benefit from a feature where you can add a sighting from an organism that you have been able to identify yourself but were unable to capture an image of, after all phone cameras are often quite limited in capability.

Edit: It never identifies anything anymore. It was good at first. The overall app is good. It's easy to navigate, and it seems to work pretty well most of the time. The camera is the worst part. 7/10 times it won't identify what I'm looking at, but gets stuck at family or genus. If the camera quality were a little better and it could ID quicker, it would definitely get another star or two.

What’s new

This update marks the first enhancement to the computer vision model since Seek’s inception. With this improvement, the app can now identify approximately 80,000 species, a significant increase from the previous 20,000. We hope this update enhances your experience and brings you greater satisfaction when using the app.