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

I had to change my review from five stars to one. In recent months, it has consistently failed to recognize plants or animals. It often just spins after taking a photo and never shows a result. I have to shut down the app and try again. It couldn't even recognize my dog was as an animal despite having done so in the past. Deleting now and trying something else.

I used to be so impressed by this app and recommend it to everyone. Something changed in the last few months and the accuracy went WAY down. I can point my camera clearly at a chickadee and the app now has a hard time even seeing a bird, half the time it tells me I'm looking at a lizard or a marmot. If this app had never worked well then I would think nothing of it, but it's sad that what was once such a useful tool has been botched so badly. I hope it returns to its older accuracy.

I don't know what they did with the last update, but the app is much better now. It had been slowly declining for years, but it just turned around in the last week or so. Gets an identification within seconds almost every time now. I've only caught it making a mistake once out of 20-30 IDs. I'm used to apps slowly degrading over time, so this was a pleasant surprise.

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.