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 created by the iNaturalist team. iNaturalist is a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. Seek was originally created with support from HHMI Tangled Bank Studios and enhanced with support from Our Planet on Netflix and WWF.

Ratings and reviews

I used to love this app. It did a great job (as far as i could tell, at least) identifying plants & animals. During about the last year or so, however, the app's ability to id anything had declined. If it does id something out seems much more likely to get it wrong but most of the time it struggles to get past genus to id a species. It cycles between a relatively useless category ("dicots" for example) and, at best, genus. I don't know what happened but I'm really disappointed.

I absolutely LOVE this app! With one major exception that knocks down the rating significantly. I've used it for a few years now, successfully identifying hundreds of species all across the continental US, as well as unsuccessfully identifying species, often with humorous results. However, every time I've gotten a new phone or had to factory reset a phone, I have to start all over again. Even if I'm signed in to iNaturalist, nothing transfers over.

This is super fun to use... When it works. It often does strange things with the blur and it's really hard to take good pictures. I wish there was an option to add pictures we've taken in the camera after the plant is identified. I also think it would be cool if, when it identities a genus or a family instead of a species, it told us why it's that classification and gives us examples of similar looking organisms to choose from (as a tentative/to-be-complete entry).

What's new

- Bug fixes