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

This app struggled to identify the simplest things. A perfectly clear shot of a blue Jay, that might be a bird. A picture of a squirrel, well, it's definitely an animal but can't get anymore detailed than that. A clear image of a racer, well it could be a snake. Also it takes forever to hone in to the point of identifying a creature. I'd rather just use the Google camera search. It can at least tell that I'm looking at a turtle.

Great app for general enthusiasts and curious observers! It is a great tool for learning about the natural world we live in. The app can get a little slow sometimes when loading the camera. It also struggles sometimes to give an exact identification. I recently upgraded phones and had to start all over with my collection of identified wildlife. Even when signed in with the same email, I am not able to access my previously scanned and ID'd findings. I would very much like an option to restore.

Looking for new species to identify keeps me busy outside! I would suggest ways to target or lock specific genus/species to get a proper ID, e.g. saw palmetto is difficult to get proper ID, It thinks its a Dwarf palmetto. This could be seen as an extra challenge though, and I'll have to come back to certain plants when they're flowering, so there could be educational value to that. I would also like to choose my camera, and the "use new picture" window sometimes bugs. still 10/10

What's new

- Bug fixes