Seek by iNaturalist

Identify plants and animals

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Seek by iNaturalist

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App stats

By: iNaturalist

Users: 3,240,442

4.78K

Rating: 3.31

(9,560)

6 new ratings

Version: 2.16.3 (Last updated: 2024-09-06)

Creation date: 2019-01-18

Email: he*****@inaturalist.org

URLs: Website ,Privacy policy

Permissions

Location: precise location (GPS and network-based)

Photos/Media/Files: read the contents of your USB storage, modify or delete the contents of your USB storage

Storage: read the contents of your USB storage, modify or delete the contents of your USB storage

Camera: take pictures and videos

Wi-Fi connection information: view Wi-Fi connections

Other:

view network connections
full network access
run at startup
draw over other apps
prevent device from sleeping

Ranking

# 28,157 ▼ 36

Other rankings

#5 in nature keyword 29 #11 in identify keyword 59 ▼ 5

Other platforms

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App summary

Analyze keywords

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.

User reviews

These summaries are automatically generated weekly using AI based on recent user reviews. Google Play Store does not verify user reviews, so some user reviews may be inaccurate, spammy, or outdated.

Pros

Fun and engaging app that encourages outdoor exploration
Useful for identifying various plants and animals
Good integration with iNaturalist for scientific contributions
Well-organized and intuitive interface
Ad-free experience

Cons

Camera functions are laggy and often fail to focus properly
Inconsistent identification accuracy, especially for plants
Issues with the app getting stuck at higher taxonomic levels (family, genus)
Limited options for downloading or backing up observations
Cannot import photos from the phone's gallery

Most mentioned

Camera autofocus problems and slowness
Inconsistent identification accuracy
Fun and engaging to use
Need for better species identification and options for incorrect identifications
Issues with app performance as the number of observations increases

User reviews

This is a really fun, ad free app offered by a great organization. I've found that it works really well, only rarely failing to ID at the species level. The connectivity with iNaturalist is excellent and useful and helps contribute to scientific research This would be a 5 * review, but I can't backup or download my observations. I can do so from iNaturalist (I think) but not everything in Seek had been uploaded there and I can't do that after the fact. Otherwise, thanks for a fantastic app

Marc DiPaolo, 2024-10-22

It's not perfect, but it works pretty well to identify plants and animals. It's good with distinct features like flowers, but not so good at identifying plants from leaves, bark, etc. It can also be hard to find the right zoom level to use. Still, you have to expect that from ML systems. It's very impressive, and a lot of fun when you're out in nature.

William Ransohoff, 2024-09-12

This app used to be pretty good... anymore, though, it rarely can identify anything, and sometimes (I'll do this just to verify it's identification) it will give me different species using virtually the same shot angle of a plant or animal. Once, I had the seek camera open and it snapped a photo of someone's legs and labled it as an alpaca 🤣... that's still quite the joke among us to this day! I'd say this app has maybe a 40-45% accuracy rate when it actually gives an identification.