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 love a lot about this app. It makes observations simple and seeing the progress as it develops can be informative. That said, it crashes a lot or seems to stop guessing and often you have to restart the app. Most importantly though, there is no way to save your observations if you get a new device. If you do not upload to inaturalist at the time of the observation, you cannot do it later. There is no export feature. New device means you lose everything, incl achievements.

This app has a lot of potential. The idea behind it and some of the features are really cool. However, it is a pain to use. It often kicks you out. The camera takes a while to load and freezes often. The camera takes too long to take a photo, often turns blurry, and focuses on the background. Plants it is okay at, but forget about animals. It often cycles between class and family, rarely making it to genus. Cool idea but the current version is incredibly frustrating to use.

It was good when I first used it. Then, all of the sudden, the app will not stay open for longer than 30 seconds and it crashes, saying "critical failure occured". I uninstalled and reinstalled, the issue did not fix. It's been going on for a month now, and I have unfortunately given up. Thankfully, inaturalist still works, and I upload my photos directly through there.

What's new

- Bug fixes