Seek by iNaturalist App Reviews

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Amazing, revolutionary app!. I have been a proud user of the iNaturalist app for a few years now. I primarily used it for plant and animal identification, although I did log some of my finds on the map. This app though, is exactly what I am looking for and what I know I want (and need!) First of all, one of my favorite features is that you can see right off the bat the common plant and animal species found in your area. The fact you can sort by species and then click on specific ones you want to learn more about makes it so much better. I love how each page for a certain species of plant or animal is detailed and jam packed with information, such as a line graph of its most common appearances throughout the year. It’s also cool to me that this data comes directly from iNaturalist logs. I hope to use this amazing app more in the future!

Perfect but for a lack of a few key features. I love this app. Use it everyday, mostly for botany related identification since I usually can’t tell a cactus from a cattail. The app reliably get most things identified to genus (>90% of the time in my experience) and to species more than I thought it could (~70%). The interface is very user friendly so viewing my species identified isn’t a challenge. However, the species identified are auto sorted by kingdom. I’m unable to sort these species by date or location, which is a pain for when I want to review any new IDs from a particular walk or stroll. Also, why is there no option to use my phone’s built in flashlight? This lack of usability is extremely annoying in low light situations (nighttime, shadows). Overall, I enjoy this app and use it daily. With a few tweaks it’ll be the perfect companion for any budding naturalist. 4/5 stars.

Excellent for identifying; poor on facts (Wikipedia). I used this app to identify over 100 plants on some vacant land that we were purchasing. I wanted to know what was native and what was introduced and Seek very rarely failed to give results. It only had trouble with tall trees, as it cannot identify well with only bark or only a piece that has fallen on the ground. Understandable. - one star because I do not like that Wikipedia is given as the source of “facts” on a plant. As every college professor knows, Wikipedia is hardly an accurate source. For example, today I identified American Grass Mantis in Alabama. Wikipedia says “found in Georgia and Florida.” Yet you can see on the Seek app that many Alabaman and Mississippians are identifying it in our locations as well. Because Wikipedia is not good at facts, I copy the scientific name of a plant or insect and run it through a reputable botany or entomology site. But other than that, Seek is a wonderful app and I recommend it often to others. I’ve even posted about it on my homeschooling site - it’s excellent for studying plants.

A new hobby discovered!!! Favorite app on my phone. Absolutely love this app. I’ve gotten to learn so much about the natural world all around me everyday and I am noticing new things I never appreciated about common plants and fungi especially. I’ve been taken long (3+ hours) walks and stopping every few block or so just to learn what a flower or weird bug is. It’s not a perfect identification tool of course. Sometimes the ID isn’t exactly right, which is fine by me because it gets close enough I can look it up on my own or post to INaturalist, which is beautifully streamlined without having to leave the app. Every now and then it can be slightly finicky about making an ID (I scanned a mushroom for awhile but never got the exact specifies, but got most of the way there). This app was recommended by a friend of mine and we love sharing our observations and cool finds with each other. I’ve discovered a new hobby that I absolutely love using this app. One thing I would love to see in future versions of the app is some way to link accounts with someone else. For example, I would love a pop-up on my phone if a friend of mine finds a new species.

Best app ever. I love this app I play this app every day. I not only learn but I get to play with it. It like Pokémon go but you can see the Pokémon in real life. I suggest getting this app. There only one thing I think they should add. I took a picture of a frozen mammoth and It didn’t go though. So if anyone developer can hear this this is what you should add. I think I should be able to take pictures of fossils and be able to learn about them. Some animals that gone exstinct. And one more thing I think I should be able to take pictures of microscopic organisms. I think that be cool. Imagin taking a picture through a microscope and see what you found that be cool. Or at least let me be able to take a photo of a flea for some reason that doesn’t work. And you don’t have to add this it just a cool thought I had.

What I would like to see. I love this app but it’s such a hassle to get it to identify a single plant. Sometimes it will just switch between two things and be stubborn. Other times it will identity a photo that is blurry! Tell me how can it identify a slight blurry/fuzzy photo perfectly but not a clear one. Mine constantly says sorry we’re not able to identify this or Seek is still learning. But other wise it’s a good app. A cool feature you can add is the ability to identify feathers. I usually end up pulling out a book of Birds and looking through to find a bird with similar feathers. sense there’s a lot of states where it illegal to collect feathers I half to take a picture. The pictures take up so much storage, and there’s legit 1 feather identification app that has 1 star ratings. So if you added that feature you get more people get this app and get better ratings(if you identify it correctly).

Best ID app out there right now. First off, I’ve yet to see any upwelling to premium/payment necessary with no limits on the amount of IDs. This app is awesome. Considering the methods used to ID various life, I can see why a lot of these plant apps are a bit off, but this one is mostly accurate at connecting the correct species, usually when it’s off the correct species will be in the related scroll at the bottom. Here’s my biggest suggestion for this app, just like I’m able to flag when it’s a misidentification I should be able to potentially find/select the correct identification from the similar plants. I’ve used this app for a day and it would be helpful on some of the more petally flowers that seem to confuse the Id aspect.

Good but Glitchy. This app works very well and helps identify a lot of things. But, this app is very, very glitchy. When it comes to looking around at different organisms in your area, the “native” and “Introduced” will constantly change for different things. I like this feature alot, helps me learn more about the animals in my area, but I’m not sure what to believe cause it will have different things each time I click on it. Like for example when I clicked on a bee I took a picture of, it will say “native”, then I click on something that says “introduced” and “threatened” then go back to that bee, it’s changed and says the introduced and threatened too. I hope this problem can be fixed but other than that, this app is super cool :))

Utterly addictive but much in need of improvement. I simply can’t stop doing this. That said there are a lot of issues. The other reviews have pointed many of these out so I’m gonna focus on the one that bothers me the most and that should be the easiest to fix, the photo management. It should be possible to import a picture into the app so you don’t have to keep interacting with your camera roll. I often have to take five or six pictures of a single thing to get a recognition, and of course often I don’t get any at all. As a result my photo roll is extremely cluttered. However it’s hard to delete the ones that are not usable because you have to toggle back-and-forth between this app and the photo roll and try to recall which of five or six very similar pictures you can delete. The net result is I usually end up deleting one that was recognizable. It would also be nice if you could look from the app into a folder or album on the photo roll so as to keep these pictures separate from your regular photo stream. It would also be great if you could replace the first picture you took of something with a later better picture. I look forward to future integrations

Great app but needs a couple extra features. I use it all the time and it has helped me learn a ton about local plants although there are a couple things that I hope the developers will listen to me on. Biggest thing is some kind of warning when you identify a plant or animal that is poisonous/venomous. I think it would be very important for safety reasons seeing as the nature of going out and touching plants can be hazardous and you won’t really know until you properly identify it. It would go a long way Second I think when you successfully identify something, having some kind of box or link to press that would immediately take you to a google search of said plant/animal would also be very convenient. Also some general QOL features and maybe an overhaul of the observations menu since after you get like 100+ you have a lot to scroll through. All in all, great app and definitely a must have for any outdoorsy people, like i said I learned a ton thanks to this app but there is the danger of a mis-identification every now and then. Mushrooms especially are a bit difficult to identify and it goes without saying you can’t really touch them if you don’t know what they are. Hope the devs have plans to improve

Amazing. I just started using seek. I saw it on Social Media so I wanted to give it a shot. I was happy to see the good reviews and reputation this app was getting. I downloaded it and the first thing I did was test the camera out for its accuracy. I pointed the camera at a red pillow. It’s a winged insect it says! I was very satisfied with the answers I’ve been getting. Bamboo is now identified as an orchid, a laptop is now a human, and my carpet identifies as an Asian small clawed otter! Elephants also now live in Antarctica. I can now see how much work and effort the iNatural team has put into this app and I admire their work. The app runs smoothly as I only run into bugs every other second, the species identification is very accurate, and there are a lot of fun activities to do in the challenge and achievements tab such as take a picture of yourself, a human 15 times to achieve the observer badge. Definitely recommend.

Excellent app. Appstore won’t let me format an easy to read review, but I have tried my best. ***PROS***: 1.) Free, no Ads (donations likely main source of revenue) 2.) Identify Plants/Animals 3.) Participate in community events 4.) Catalog/record observations to app 5.) App contributes to human desire to understand and observe nature ***POTENTIAL IMPROVEMENTS***: 1.) Allow direct download of observations from app 2.) Display “safety pop-up” upon opening the app, not when accessing camera (allows for faster capture of observations) 3.) Add option to toggle phone flashlight while using camera 4.) Allow additional features that are only available to registered users to non-users. Mining personal data should not be required for some of the features that are withheld from non-registered users. ***Additional improvement***: (no clue how viable this is): Optional download of data relating to local wildlife (user location would be required) to the users device. Allowing for the device’s hardware to mitigate the need for a strong internet connection.

Great app ! 🐸. I love this app and use it all the time for identifying organisms. love the challenges too :) my only issues with it right now are 1. i’d prefer if, when you go into the details of an observation, it doesn’t put you back at the top of the list when you go back to all your observations. it’d be a lot easier if it just put you back where you were on the list. 2. would it be possible for the app to take range into account when identifying species ? i’ve run into a situation a couple times where a creature is the only one of it’s genus or family in the area, but the app still can’t identify it. 3. it’d be cool if your observations on iNaturalist could transfer over to Seek !! so that anything the app can’t identify, i can just log myself. Overall it’s a great app, i use it all the time and love it !! 🐸

Amazing but a Couple Suggestions. UPDATE: With one of the latest app updates, all my challenges that I’ve already completed have been reset to 0%!! 😢 This app is amazing, but I have a couple suggestions to make it even better. • Add a search feature under My Observations. After observing many different species, sometimes I want to go back and look at one but have to scroll through dozens of observations just to find it. • Reduce the time spent on the intro splash screen that appears when you open the app as well as the screen that comes up when you open the camera feature. When my phone is low on battery or storage and I just need to go straight to the camera ID feature to ID something quickly, it can take a long time to wait for the opening splash screen to disappear, the app to load and be ready to use, and then the camera warning to go away before I can use the app for what I need it for quickly.

One of my favorite apps.. Last time I got a new phone, the data didn’t transfer from my old phone to the new one, and I lost all of the observations I’d recorded in Seek, and gave it a bad review. I kept that phone for a few years, but just recently got a new one. I was very relieved when my seek data transferred seamlessly this time. I’m not sure if it’s because they fixed in in the app, or if apple has improved the way data is transferred when you get a new phone (because it seems other apps that had problems before did a better job transitioning as well). But either way I’m happy to have all my old observations, and they’ve also made some other great improvements such as the camera automatically snapping a pic when it gets to species— so many times after anguishing to get just the right angle, I would get species only to loose it just from the slight nudge of pressing the camera button to take a picture. So that’s no longer a problem. Good job guys!

Amazing. When I got this app I was under the impression that I take it out and take a picture then it would identify the organism. But much to my delightful surprise, it was identifying the organisms BEFORE I even took a picture! The scanning feature is AMAZING!!!! We just moved to a new place and have organisms I am not familiar with so this has been so fun and informative to use! This is awesome!!! Everyone should have this in order to being more awe and appreciation to what’s around them! What I love: 1. How it recognizes things quickly and pretty accurately just by holding your camera over it 2. How it gives you details within the app about the organism you identified! That’s wonderful because you can learn right then and there without having to get out of the app and find the info somewhere else which could lead to distraction. 3. IT’S FREE!!! 4. EASY!!! Instead of searching through pages of books for what you might have found, this easily opens the “page” of info for you! Recommend for: - Everyone!! - Gardeners - Homeschoolers - Educators - Homeowners - Animal enthusiasts - Plant enthusiasts - Nature enthusiasts - Camping - Hiking Suggestions for developers: Keep up the great work!

One of my favorite apps on my phone!. Seek is a great app, I love going outside and scanning plants and insects, it’s incredible how diverse my surroundings are! Especially on a college campus like mine where it’s nice to have something to do while walking between class buildings. I’ve introduced my family to the app and they all love it, too! I’m always on the lookout for new things to find, and as a result I’m appreciating nature a lot more than I used to! One thing I would like to suggest is a change to how the observations are sorted. Right now species are sorted by the date you found them, which is good, but once you find enough species it starts getting difficult to look back on specific entries. Maybe there could be an option to sort the species in each category by genus (As in, within each category the entries are alphabetically ordered according to the genus in their scientific name)? It doesn’t have to be a complete change, but maybe just an option people can toggle on and off. Other than that one thing, though, this app is near perfect for nature lovers like me!

A good and promising start that needs some tinkering. Seek is a very promising extension of iNaturalist and has a lot of potential as a family-friendly game. The Badge System is pretty cool (interestingly similar to Pokémon GO?), but it’s unclear if there is any long-term “goal” or incentive to getting higher badge rankings other than bragging rights. I think this is ultimately what will hinder long-term use of the app. The interface is great though - much better than the actual iNaturalist app and more aesthetically pleasing. It feels like Seek can serve as an actual learning tool, and I sincerely hope that the core iNaturalist app adopts some of its concepts. In terms of how accurate it is... well, it’s limited and not always 100% accurate (it recognized my Goat observation as a Dog) but it’s also as complex as it needs to be. My biggest grievance is that when a genus lacks a Common Name, it doesn’t show up in a species’ taxonomy. It‘s a little jarring.

Good app, needs a few more housekeeping items. I just downloaded this app in early June and thought it was amazing. It instantly identified some trees that I have been wondering about for a while. However, I have gotten slightly concerned over a few of the identifications. For example I recently scanned an eastern hemlock, but the scanner said it was western(I’m on east coast and it did this for multiple specimens). A fix that wouldn’t be to hard would be a flagging system (which would let the scanner know an organism isn’t getting identified correctly) or the option to go back from “western hemlock” to just the “hemlock” ID. This would allow seek to realize that you haven’t actually identified a specific species. Another useful function would be the ability to post to iNaturalist after viewing the species page without having to rescan the organism. These suggestions may sound “easy”, but coding and implementing them is complicated. Thanks for all the work so far!

Best app I’ve ever downloaded. This is just perfect, all I could ever ask for, I’ve always loved animals and plants and all things nature and have wanted to make it a hobby of mine to go outside more and see all the things around me, been playing a lot of Pokémon go and this app is like that but real life. So cool, I don’t have anything bad to say about this except maybe how it goes through battery pretty fast (ik there’s is like bearly anything you can do about that) but also it does that tend to crash and close itself out a little bit, not enough to be annoying to me idk if I’m the only one that hat happens to of if it maybe my service, but anyway, I’m thanks for such a great app and keep up the fantastic work

Could be better.. This app would be 5/5 if it could utilize the full iOS camera array possibly some limited features as well. As it stands now it appears to only use one camera, it also has great difficulty focusing on small or near objects, pretty much impossible to get an identification of anything far away without a binocular adapter. I enjoy the challenges, practicing my taxonomy and for more common species it works great. If nothing else you can use it to identify to family and use a key to get to species. iNaturalist is a good companion app and for some reason has better camera functionality. If the camera gets upgraded this would be an amazing app to just wander around and ID everything, think Pokémon Go, but real life, actually learning, contributing to science, and it doesn’t scrape your data and take your money. Gotta ID ‘em all.

Recommended. Great app. Has been working really well, though of course with expected difficulties with identifying incorrect species on occasions. With the new update, I miss the ability to zoom in on already taken photos within the app so as to improve the ability to identify. Instead, I now have to edit it with my photo app, where going between the two apps can be a bit cumbersome. Additionally, the new update came with a glitch. The app will close when I attempt to look at my observations. Plan to delete and redownload, hopefully that fixes the problem. Update - I deleted and redownloaded, now all of my observations have been deleted and I don’t know if there is any way of getting them back. I’m pretty disappointed by this.

Racial Bias. Until recently, I’ve enjoyed using this app and thought it was fun to identify different plants. However, I can’t rate an app more than 1 star when it can’t reliably identify the human species with darker skin tones. I’m referring to an unfortunate event that occurred with my 11 year old daughter and two of her friends. They were outside using this app to identify various plants and they decided to scan my daughter to see what would happen. It identified her as a human. Cool! Next, they scanned another girl and she was also identified as a human. Yay! Then they scanned another girl who happens to have a darker skin tone and it couldn’t identify her. What?!? She removed her glasses and still nothing. All three girls stood in the exact same spot with identical backgrounds. Let me be clear so that can sink in - two white girls were identified as humans and one black girl was not. I would like this app to improve its technology to properly scan and identify ALL humans with their varying shades of skin color. Until that happens, the classification of humans should be removed from this app until it can correctly identify ALL humans from ALL races.

Addictive, but…. I have taken obvious pictures that won’t connect and many that connect to the wrong species. For instance, I took a picture of an obvious bumblebee from nearly every angle with no luck and an Asian lady beetle pupa was connected to a zigzag ladybird. Bugs aside, I did recognize a few errors with plants. It would be better to have a “this is wrong, let me suggest a correction” option. Also, it is so difficult to focus the camera. It connects a blurry image, but refuses to connect the image when I spend far too much time trying to focus. I end up leaving the app to use the native iPhone app. All that said, I do realize how new this type of matching technology is so I can only deduct one star and continue taking pictures of everything nature brings me. One more thing, it would be nice to have poisonous stuff highlighted. Very cool app. *edit—it should tag photos with what Seek identified them as and have the ability to cycle through photos based on identification. I’m trying to snap pictures at different stages, so I know what is what when it is time to cleanup the yard. It would also be nice to have the pictures document which plants most attract beneficial insects.

Had to start over when I got a new phone. This is an amazing app, but I have two major complaints, both of them similar. There is no way for users to back up their data, so when I got a new phone I lost all the hundreds of observations I’d made and many badges and achievements. They really need to add the ability to back up your account progress in iCloud or something like that. The second complaint is that when you make an observation but the app can’t identify it, and then upload the photo to iNaturalist where it is later identified positively, you don’t get credit for that in either your observations or your challenges/achievements. Adding a sync ability between your Seek account and your iNat account would be a huge incentive to upload observations and it could also potentially solve the first problem I mentioned as well and eliminate the need for an iCloud save option. Again, I love this app, but making these changes would drastically improve the user’s experience and motivate people to continue using the app after upgrading to a new phone when many might give up on it upon learning they have to start from zero again.

Best, best, best gift.. This app is the best gift I got in many years. I have learned the names of all that’s around me, and there is so much more richness than I ever realized. I also love being able to read more about each plant or animal, and teach my daughter and grandsons all that we get to see, in backyards, on city streets, parks, woods. This app tells me, so quickly, and with great accuracy. It does it scientifically, so I also know the order, family, genus. And the pictures are recorded so I don’t lose the learning. I am using this to make a collection with my grandsons. To make games, etc. It makes outdoor time even more fun, and we see and notice the richness and plethora of what we have, even on a city street. I used to have to take guidebooks and slow down to look up each one. In just five minutes in a less used part of my backyard I’ve identified 8 plants I wasn’t quite sure of, or learned new. Get this app! Teach your children. Their eyes and love for their rich world will never be the same. It’s like being in a room where you know no one, or being in a room where you know every face and name.

Fun app, not always accurate. I love this app. Most of the time it seems to work well, identifying insects, plants, frogs, humans, and anything else I think to point my phone at. However, sometimes the IDs are simply inaccurate. For example, it identified a dragonfly in my yard as a type of Indian dragonfly. Looking at the other sitings, mine was the only one in the Western Hemisphere. I think its performance might improve if it took region into account a little more. Also, birding apps I use let you give feedback on its IDs—“This is my bird!” Or “This is not my bird.” I’d like to be able to give feedback, and it might help the program improve. Also, if I tell it that it’s not a wasp spider then it might be able to try again and correctly identify it as a yellow garden spider, but instead it keeps insisting on the same inaccurate identification. I’d also like improvement or at least some clearer instructions on how to ID trees. If I’m in the woods it’s hard to get a top to bottom view of a tree so I try to get both leaves and bark in a shot, but most of the time it doesn’t work. What could I be doing to ID trees more easily?

One step closer to a Star Trek Tricorder. It’s pretty awesome being able to ID organisms by just holding them in the frame of a camera! Moving critters are tricky to get. But it’s still rewarding to “collect” as many images from all the branches of the tree of life as you can. I have only 2 complaints: 1. The relationship between this app and iNaturalist needs more explanation. Yes, I know Seek “gets its data” from iNaturalist. But although I logged into my iNaturalist account in Seek, it’s not at all obvious if, how, or when my observations are shared with the greater iNaturalist online community. 2. Photos taken in Seek do not have any camera metadata attached to them! Seek makes it optional whether to include observations in the Photos app. I like to. But there is no way for me to filter observations taken on my older iPhone vs. my new iPhone, because there is no metadata on the phone/camera model on Seek photos. (If any devs are reading this, please add this feature! BONUS POINTS: Allow me to designate an album in Photos for my Seek observations.) Despite these things, this is a pretty phenomenal app. If you have any interest in the natural world, this is a fantastic example of how technology can support curiosity and exploration, and allow personally-driven learning.

I’ve never written a review, BUT this app deserves it!!. Super cool concept and well implemented! Yes, it can be a little slow to identify a species, but I appreciate the fact that it will tell you what stage it is on in identification being the kingdom, class, species etc... The interface is beautiful and easy to use. Of course there are minor details out there that could improve the app, but I would say it’s executed far more beautifully in terms of being user friendly and its interface design than most apps out there. As I said in the title of my review, I have never reviewed an app ever, but I love the concept of this app so much, I felt it deserved it. I have already suggested it to many of my nature-loving friends and can’t wait to keep identifying and learning about more species!

Nice, but…. Look, the concept is amazing. This kind of thing has been long overdue on such a scale among apps that works at all. The problem is… Flies, fly. Birds fly. Frogs jump. Spiders skitter away. Some at lightning speed. They all hide as well. Nothing stands still and let’s you get a good angle. Heck, sometimes I knew what it was but the app didn’t. It’s also very difficult for the camera to focus, but that might just be my phone. I took a very good picture of a frog… they couldn’t find out what it was. Thought a striped fly was a tree crab and was standing there an hour. Got an amazingly clear photo of a spider, still only figuring out that it indeed was a spider. Some of my most amazing pictures can’t be deciphered because I am taller than eye level of the animal. I have to stand directly parallel, which could be dangerous. And I have to stand there trying to get a good angle, at least for 15 minutes, and that’s if your lucky. Most times you can’t get the actual species by picture which is a real bummer. A robin is not a groundhog. So please work on that, ok? It would be amazing if I didn’t have to be in an exact position to figure out what animal is in front of me. Other than that, amazing. It’s a huge leap from what we used to do.

Love this app!. I’ve been using the app for a couple of weeks now and I’ve had lots of fun. I’ve found over 200 organisms and I’m just getting started. I do have some suggestions for the developers. The app is horrible at identifying trees and mushrooms. It hasn’t been able to identify any of the oaks or pines in my neighborhood no matter what angle I use. It also won’t identify a lot of the mushrooms I’ve found. I’m also not sure what the “other” category is for. I wish that there was a way to sort organisms besides the order you found them in. I’ve started a spreadsheet on my own for the 175+ plants I’ve found. Lastly, the species that pop up on the home screen for my area aren’t super accurate. I know for a fact the one of the species lives north of me and I have never found one In my area. I definitely recommend this app for anyone interested in nature.

Bugs. I want to give 5 stars for a great concept but the flaws ruin the app for me. The fact you can’t change the header photo for a sighting is ridiculous considering the app decided to replace all my observations with the exact same photo. It also doesn’t work in anything less than extremely bright, direct light and the ability to identify fungi is abysmal. Out of six very clear, close up photos only one was correctly identified. It also was unable to identify high pixel images of a dragonfly and multiple frogs. It misread green carpet moss as a white mushroom and I have no way to delete the incorrect observation. I’m considering deleting because it’s so frustrating, especially the cloned photos. EDIT: app deleted. It keeps cloning photos and it’s obvious the developers aren’t responding to criticism, haven’t seen any updates release. it’s a pity they are wasting this app’s potential. And for those saying “you must not have a nice enough phone,” I’m using an iPhone X with the most recent software update. I take images in clear, bright light. No reason the performance should be so poor.

Fantastic. This app is a great tool to have if you want to learn more about the environment near you. Though often times inaccurate, it is reliable if you get good lighting and a focused picture. I do think this app should have a feature telling you the danger level of the animal/planr you observed. For instance, if you scan a species of snake it would be useful to know if the species is venomous without having to read through the source article. It could also let you if an animal tends to be feral or not. For plants it could tell you if the berries are safe to eat, the leaves have the oil similar to poison ivy, etc. This would just specifically be for safety reasons so once users recognize the animal they know to stay away. Otherwise fantastic app and I have inspired others to download and scan the environment around them.

This used to be more useful to me. I actually love this app and have been using it for many years, I find it more user friendly than inaturalist, bc I don’t necessarily want to share all my observations or my location. Plus, Seek is just more fun. What I’ve found in the past 6 months or so are 3 problems. 1. The app doesn’t arrive at identifications as much as it used to. It gets to one step away, regardless of the angle of the photo, making it extremely frustrating to use. This is especially so for tiny insects. 2. I used to be able to get identification from pictures I took with my native camera, and it seems that they are never identified anymore. This actually used to be my back up method when Seek wouldn’t ID something. Now it doesn’t seem to work at all anymore. 3. There’s no way to disagree with a misidentification. There are things I know are not correctly identified, but no way to correct it. If I wrote this a year ago, I would have given it more stars, but I’m frustrated. That said, I still use it almost daily.

Love the app, hate the delay. It’s great being able to identify new animals, insects, and plants and helps children and adults alike to develop a curiosity about the world around us. The one thing that would make this app better, though, is reducing the lag time between opening the app and being able to scan for identification. When trying to identify animals and insects, in particular, they don’t always hang around long enough to be able to identify them due to this lag time. The app takes time to “load” and then there is a reminder about watching one’s surroundings. Safety is absolutely important, but maybe there could be an option to disable that step/click on an initial “I know to be safe. Don’t show this warning again” option.

Nice app, GPS problematic. I love the app (and iNaturalist of course) and I wish i could give it 5 stars, but I can’t. On the positive side, it has a sleek UI (I wish that iNat main app would borrow some of it) and is easy to use. I like the challenges / achievements. On the negative side, the biggest issue is the location / GPS which is most of the time inaccurate and making the posting to iNat problematic. Also, if you change location, you always need to restart the app. Other problems include identifying some animals and plants as American species when the location is clearly in Europe, where other species are present. Lastly, despite using the best pics possible, it is unable to identify certain common birds (House Sparrow, Eurasian Magpie, Carrion Crow, Buzzard) at species level. On the iNat app or site, the same pics result in species Identification. Will all shortcomings, it is still a great app for nature lovers and the curious.

Great Update. I’ve been using this app since it was release a year ago. And I’ve been steadily waiting for an update since then. I was so excited to see an update and I immediately downloaded it and started using the app again. Since then I have collected over 400 species and with this new update I was able to collect a few that never went through the old edition. I wanted to make sure that all of my old species make it through to the new app but every time I go to the “My observations” the app freezes and gives me a blank white screen. I thought maybe it needed a minute to download all of the species so I left it on that white screen for hours and nothing changed. Although this doesn’t break the game for me, I would like to see this feature work for me. Thank you for your hard work and I look forward to continuing to use your app to explore the world.

Fantastic App: Potential Improvement. I love this app. I’m a big nature guy and being out there is my favorite pastime. I love beefing up my observations with things I know and learning more from things I don’t know. May I suggest a potential feature for a second. I believe the app could do well with a warning system if you are documenting a dangerous species of animal/plant/fungus. I recently documented a Copperhead snake (incredible) but I was shocked to see that the app did not warn me that this snake could do some serious damage if it bit me. This would be exceptionally valuable for plant/fungus species as well, as they could be considered safe or dangerous to eat. Otherwise, I can’t stop using it and look forward to moving up the ranks!

Worst app ever!. I just downloaded this app a few minutes ago and I can’t make it work. It asked me if I wanted it to use my location. I said no. I don’t understand why the app needs to know where I am. Then, when I tried to use the app, it said I can’t use it unless I let it know my location. Why does the app give you the option to say you don’t want it to use your location if that isn’t really an option? I really wanted to use the app,so I decided that I would let it know my location. It said I could configure that in settings. I went to settings and there was no option for turning the location on!! There are only three options in the settings: Select language,Seek camera, and species detail. So my advice to anyone downloading this app is to make sure you say yes to allowing the app to know where you are. If you don’t, apparently you won’t have the opportunity later to turn location detection on. I am deleting the app now.

Great app but one suggestion. This app is amazing and is very fun to use. I have spent hours outside trying to find all of the things the app can identify. I have one suggestion though; the challenges are fun and it’s fun collecting the bad ges and achievements. However, you have to find a new species each time to complete the challenges. I have completed most of the challenges except the new ones because I have seemingly found almost every species in my area. It makes it very hard to complete the new challenges once you have identified so many species. It would be nice if even if it wasn’t a new species it still counted towards your achievements. This is the only issue I have with this app though. It’s definitely not perfect but it is the closest thing to a real life Pokédex.

Needs this feature!. This is a great app. My whole family loves it! I cannot say how mush fun we all have seeking for new species, identifying things we see along the way, etc. I understand that the identification is not perfect (trouble identifying, mis-identifying) but I expect it to improve, and compared to my brain’s knowledge and skill, this is amazing! I want to ask for one feature to help with one of the most annoying parts of this app. Nothing is more frustrating when trying to identify species is when another species is also in the picture. For example, I’m trying to get that bird or insect, and the app only sees that plant instead. I think some sort of “lock” by tapping on the identification level would really help. Then the app knows that yes, I’m looking for that class insecta and not that dicot, and it won’t backtrack. (This could be done at any identification level and help with identification backtracking in general.)

Right 75% of the Time. When I first discovered this app, while we were visiting Oklahoma, I was extremely impressed. However the people that showed me had the newest iPhones with excellent cameras. I have not had as much success, now that it’s on my slightly older iPhone, or bc I’m now in Iowa. But to be honest, it’s now very frustrating and disappointing. Many times it will say it is almost at a species, but after trying for 5 to 10 minutes on a few plants, not kidding, it still has not detected a species!! After that long I gave up on identifying a willow, an African violet and a couple other plants. Other times, it gets to a species, only to be wrong. Probably the most frustrating thing about this, is that once it determines a species, even if it’s incorrect, it saves it to my observations and I have no idea how to delete those. So now I have multiple saved “observations” that are literally wrong. And if I choose to take a picture and try to save an observation before it has reached species, it may briefly tell me the family or genus, which I find helpful, but apparently it does not save this information! So I cannot go back and review this helpful information since it did not reach species status! Overall I enjoy this app, but wish there was a way to delete observations, and a way to save “incomplete” observations, even if it hasn’t reached species.

Very cool with a few issues. I love this app and have recommended it to a lot of friends. It honestly feels like walking around with a real-life Pokédex. When it works, it’s a super fast, easy way to get to know the species around me that I’m curious about but almost never remember to/take the time to look up after I’ve walked past them. That said, it has some issues and could be better. Like others have said, there’s no way to correct when it mislabels an observation, which is annoying because it means you’re stuck with misidentified observations. There’s also no way (that I’ve found) to upload an old observation to iNaturalist for community verification — if you don’t do it when you first get the observation, you’re out of luck. It’s also not great at IDing bugs, especially small ones. If your camera can’t take macro shots, the image quality just isn’t enough to get down to species. I definitely don’t hold it’s inability to identify a blurry beetle against it, but it’s something to note.

Really love the app but I have issues sometimes. Sometimes the app auto scans things while I'm trying to scan something else and by the time I get whatever pop-up out of the way (same observation or challenge complete, etc) the thing I was actually trying to scan goes away into the wild :( other times I try to scan something 1ft from me, getting multiple angles and still no scan, it just stays on the second to last bubble never able to get the final result. I know what the species is too because I see it on the home page at the location I'm at. It would be nice to just go "okay you can't scan this, I'll just upload the picture I got and set it to this species" or at least have a way to let you pick it if it looks similar to one you're labeling it as. The species I've had that issue with is the Great-Tailed Grackle. I've been scanning different ones for 4 days now and still haven't been able to get Seek to get it but have the most clear picture of one. Sometimes the animals are super well camouflaged too and Seek just can't see them at all. It's frustrating sometimes but overall the app has been working fine and has had no problems. Plants work more compared to animals it seems. Can't really get bugs like ticks and mosquitos, but I guess I can blame my camera for that one. iPhone 12. This review would be 5 stars if it wasn't for those small issues I have. All in all amazing app and I use it all the time now.

Ok, but needs improvement. This app is pretty good, but it does need a lot of work. I downloaded Seek after iNaturalist, because I wanted an app that immediately identifies the species for you instead of having to wait for others on the app to do it. I really like the concept, but it does have some bugs that need fixing. First, the database that identifies species needs to be cleaned up. The picture has to be very clear for it to be identified, otherwise it won’t work. Once when I took a picture of a moth in bad lighting, it identified it as a species I knew it very clearly wasn’t, and there was no way for me to change it. Also the camera in the app won’t let you zoom in, so I have to take a picture with my phone’s camera and then input the picture in the app. Lastly, I wish the app tracked specifically how many of each kind of organism you find (reptiles, mammals, etc). It will reward you when you reach a milestone of 5, 15, etc. finds, but it doesn’t tell you anywhere how many of each you have. It has the overall total of organisms, but it doesn’t list something like, “you have 11 mammals, only 4 more to go till your next achievement!” But despite all the bugs, it is a pretty cool app in theory. I like how it awards badges for certain numbers of organisms found, that’s a fun idea. I do get annoyed when it won’t accurately identify species sometimes, but I’ll keep using it and hopefully it will improve.

first app in 10 years to render my phone inoperable. I should have known better than to download something iNaturalist was involved with after using that app, but Seek was highly recommended by my employer. The app is beyond buggy. It obviously struggles w/ location services. I have to click and drag the locator to the correct spot as it thinks I am in CO (not UT). Even w/ 2 bars LTE it was telling me blackbrush was African Buckthorn and Buffaloberry was endemic of New Zealand. If that wasn't bad enough today its turn on location services dialogue box rendered my phone inoperable. I couldn't click out of it, power cycle my phone off, make or receive phone calls (for work), receive texts... Anyway if your in this situation in a remote area your screwed. So drive to town and get on wifi and back up your phone. Once the phone backs up the dialogue box is gone... then promptly delete the app!!! Got to give to the developers of this one for an app that not only doesn't function properly but gives you the added benefit of an inoperable phone. Thats iPhone 8 IOS 14.6!

It’s improved but still needs work. I’ve had this app for about a year and there has been some improvements in the past year. However, there are still a lot of issues on identifying a lot of species. I seem to have the hardest time with arachnids and fungi. This is especially frustrating when trying to complete the monthly challenges. For example, yesterday I had a perfect, in focus picture of a silk moth (identified through a quick google search) and the app simply wouldn’t recognize it. I’ve had other pics taken on a Nikon d750 which are professional level pics it wouldn’t identity. Another reviewer suggested maybe some questions or possibly something user based to help identify specimens the app otherwise has issues with. Allowing zoom will help as well. Personally I don’t want to get inches away from a fast moving spider to get its information. Overall the app has been mostly enjoyable and I hope it continues to evolve.

BEST AP I EVER GOT!. From “Black Witch Butter” (fungus) to “Fallfish” to “Parson’s House Spider” to “Wild Sarsaparilla” this ap has helped me ID a WIDE variety of plant, fish, insect, bird, fungus/mushroom, animal and tree species! I’ve used it in 5 states so far and learned so much. I love the Challenges. They make me pay more attention to the nature around me and look for and notice more species and different ecosystems. Best ap I have gotten for terrestrial identification! Paired with the iNaturalist, it is a huge learning, teaching, and cataloging tool. When I report my findings from Seek to Naturalist I feel like I have contributed to the scientific research on wildlife and ecosystems. LOVE IT! I hope that they develop more apps that ID our natural world, hopefully geology, crystals, gemstones and rocks, and sky and weather apps!

Needs work. Unlike iNaturalist, there is no option to see what the most likely possibilities are and choose one. If it doesn’t correctly identify the organism by itself, you’re just out of luck. It also doesn’t identify still photos very well. I tested it with the camera and it correctly identified a tree when I took the photo. I then used the saved photo that it took and it was unable to identify it even though that was the photo that it took when it previously identified it. And unlike iNaturalist again, you cannot choose other folders when selecting photos. So my only option to identify things in older photos on my phone is to spend a considerable amount of time scrolling as there is no way to scroll quickly in the app because it only loads a few photos at a time. I love the idea of this, but it’s missing some basic functions. I’ll give it another try when it’s less frustrating to use.

Cute for a few plants/trees. If you use it for a day, it’s cute and can ID a handful of things. Use it for a week and you’ll hate how it can’t ID insects, has a devil of a time IDing tree species even when in full leaf, can’t deal with anything in the frame moving (not the best for a naturalist app meant to be used outside) and forget about getting an ID on a bird, reptile or any kind of wildlife. I’ve basically been touching insects with my phone camera, using 20+ slow angles to check it out and it can still only barely get to genus without making it to species. Generally a frustrating experience overall as it sets you up to get the id and then no matter how many angles or zooms or approaches you try, it can’t figure it out. Pass on this app if you like apps that work well, go for it if you don’t care and are just hoping to ID one or two stationary shrubs basically.

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A must have app!. This app identifies so much more than plants and animals. It identifies fish, insects, birds, fungi and more. Every adult and child should get this because it’s just so informative, educational and has easy to use features and fun challenges. And it’s free with absolutely no annoying no ads. Thanks to the developers, this is one of the best apps I’ve stumbled across.

Fix mis-identification?. Fun app. Issue is I can’t find a way to fix it when it gets it wrong?

Works great!. Works surprisingly well, not great with Australian stuff but it’s good to get a general guess. Don’t rely on it to eat stuff of course

Best app on the App Store. My positive reviews kept disappearing, so here are some negatives. Please enable manual entry, tired of trying and trying for hours to identify things I already know. I am in Australia, stop identifying Australian creatures as North American or European. Many of the things the App tells me do not exist here.

Hardly Working. [18-05-2019] When I first downloaded this app a couple of weeks ago, everything seemed to be working. But today, it’s only partially working - while it tries to identify things, it doesn’t save them in ‘my observations’ or anywhere else. It doesn’t save anything else, either. To continue using this app, would be ridiculous! I’ll wait to see if the problems are fixed, before deleting this app and never trying the developers apps (ever again).

Amazing. The quality of the photos and the accuracy of the detection is awesome! Love going out and taking photos of the wildlife and plants and finding out what they are 🥰

Test. I did two simple tests to see if it worked. Test no.1 Chicken - What seek thought it was = jungle fowl. Test no.2 Mushroom - What seek though it was = A species in the animal category. Conclusion = SEEK DOES NOT WORK!

Very good. Need to add friends. This app is a lot of fun and makes walks in the park so much more interesting. It would be great if we could add friends to see their observations!

It’s good. The premise is good and the app works pretty well for the most part. Although it does crash on a very regular basis for no apparent reason. I use a phone that can very much handle the app so the crashing is entirely a problem within the app. The second issue is that the seek camera is extremely bad. It doesn’t recognise about 60% of the wildlife that I try to identify. No matter how clear the photos are. I think that you would be well served to add a manual log feature where as I can log the plant or animal manually so that I don’t have to rely 100% on the camera which doesn’t work so often. I know that this could open the doors to cheating but honestly the amount of times the seek camera misidentifies a plant or animal has already opened that door long ago. The app is good. It just need a bit of polishing.

Great. The app works well, identifies it as closely as possible, though sometimes it doesn’t adjust to the lighting of the pace if you point it down. I have used many times, it gives you details on the species, tells you the whole taxidermy and works like a treat!

Time waster. Didn’t identify any of 10 common plants

An issue. The app works pretty well; it has good identification and documentation skills that link to my iNaturalist. The main issue is that there is no option to sign in with google or Facebook. I use my google account for the normal iNaturalist app, but there is no option on seek to sign in with my google account. I try to use my google account details with the normal login engine but it doesn’t work, even when I try to change my password and redownload the app and restart my device. This annoying issue means I cannot access my preexisting iNaturalist account.

Possibly the absolute best identification app available in Australia. Would not recommend another

Seek. Very comprehensive, though sometimes misidentifies organisms, probably due to the light

Crashes upon open every time iPhone 13 Pro Max. Can’t open it on iPhone 13 Pro Max, multiple updates and it still crashes every time.

Feature request. Please make this compatible with photos that are lower quality from low light.

Beautiful game and fun. There’s lots to talk about so there’s 3 thugs I going to talk about 1. I love the game it’s fun and there’s so much today about it’s good traits 2. They could fix this some plants and animals that just don’t get pictures it take sooooo much too get a plant or bug or animal sometimes 3. There’s a glitch we’re I got an axolotl when I took a pic of a elephant 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

This app is fantastic!. Thank you so much iNaturalist for keeping your app free and making it a scientific staple. Unlike many of your competitors your service is 100% free as it should be. Nobody should have to pay for plant and animal identification, especially when our environmental future is at stake. Stupid capitalist mindset limits our true potential as a species, information should be taught and shared for free and not locked behind subscriptions and paywalls. Knowledge is wealth and wealth is pointless if we’re all dead.

Anti weeb. Anti weeb not fair don’t know who Naruto is

Doesn’t work to identify plants. Which I thought was the main purpose! I was hoping to use it as a plant ID app, knowing that it wouldn’t fair very well on Australian native plants due to it being an American app, however it says literally everything in my garden is a member of the Dicot family (even a common mulberry tree) and ‘can not identify the exact species’. Pretty useless for a garden/plant lover sadly and I will be deleting it.

GREAT. it’s educational and fun I showed this to my science teacher and he might be implementing it into our Biology lessons. though it sometime doesn’t pick up what I’m scanning it’s still a great app and keep working on it. Ps. Thank you WWF for sponsoring this app you are so kind.

Amazing app, but not transferrable to new devices. This is one of my favourite apps, so handy and educational. I really love being able to look through the plants and animals I’ve captured on it. I recently bought a new phone but am unable to transfer my observations onto it. I would really love if this was made possible as I’m going to lose years of observations. I tried making an inaturalist account to post them there, but you can only upload them right as you make a new observation. A bit disappointing but other than that it’s a wonderful app.

Seek App. App doesnt work with photos

Too damn addicting. This app is just too addicting. It’s like geocaching, except you’re trynna find little fuzzy or scaly dudes. And there’s no plastic waste. Maybe a better example is Pokémon Go, except the Pokémon are real. If you want to ID everything, this is the app for you.

Best app ever. I love this app and before you read anymore of this INSTALL THE APP!!! Am I right? Yes. I like how you can identify like all species. Not like plant identifiers that only identifies plants. So I recommend you install this app the moment you see it! Oh, and if you got it I hope you have fun! PS. You can level up and get badges for challenges!

App is really good, but I can’t sign in with my google.. PLEASE fix this issue, I only put 2 stars because of this issue, otherwise 5 stars.

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Love it 😂. I love this app 😂 it thought my standard poodle was an alpaca numerous times, a camel a few times, my Himalayan cat a domestic Guinea pig then later a giant panda 😂😂😂😂 it did get my other cat a domestic cat tho 👍🏻 and it was real quick to identify plants! It’s just entertaining 😂

This is my new favourite app. I love this app

Doesn’t work.. After update it crashes upon entering the app.

Lost years worth of data. 😭. I’ve been using Seek for years. Had to reset my iPhone this week and even after logging back into my iNaturalist account (within Seek) I was super disappointed to realize that years worth of observations and challenges weren’t saved anywhere. Please update the the app to support some sort of cloud storage. 😔

J’ai une suggestion. Ça fait quelques jours que j’ai commencé à utilisé l’application Seek par iNaturalist et je l’apprécie beaucoup. Et j’aimerais faire une suggestion… je voudrais pouvoir envoyé des informations complémentaires, qui proviennent de publication de ma région, à propos des observations que je fait avec l’application et qui pourrait être écrit dans une section « autres informations » Comme par exemple un autre nom commun utilisé dans ma province.

Fleurs de ciboulette-ail et de basilic. Quel plaisir de bénéficier d’une aide si précise et rapide pour l’identification des plantes ! Vous changez ma vie quotidiennement!

Bat app!!😠. I don’t even give it one star ⭐️ I give it 0 I scanned a plant and it said it was a bird I scanned my dog it said she was a bat 🦇. don’t get this app it is bad. I scanned my frogs 🐸 it said they were trees 🌲 I scanned my cats 🐈 it said they only eat meat 🥩 which my cats eat meat and veggies 🍅 I Scanned my purple plant I don’t know what it is called but the app said it was an animal 🦒 I scanned a Spider 🕷 The app said it was an mammal

Awesome except…. My hamster Ginger can’t be scanned and when I go and/or look outside all I see is a white screen so plz fix

love it but. I love this app so much and it used to work well. Now, everything i scan is not recognisable by the app and I have to upload everything to inaturalist for people to identify. Very frustrating!!!

Amazing. Wow

Question. Does it work with bugs?

Sad to see what’s become of this app. It is sad to see the decline of this app. It is next to unusable now, and the group behind it now requires users to consent to tracking and data harvesting. Identification rarely works any longer so I won’t be missing this app. I will be filing a privacy complaint with authorities as well as, of course, closing my account. User beware! It would be nice if Apple actually enforced its supposed privacy rules that were enacted to protect users. This is just one of many apps that I have encountered that should be removed from the App Store for violations.

Cannot Log In. Signed in to the iNaturalist app using Facebook. No such option to log in to Seek with Facebook. When I go to create a new account to use the Seek app, it is saying my email is already taken so I cannot even create a new account. Frustrating to say the least!

Thank you!. What a helpful app. It works so well and we had a lot of fun using it while camping.

Needs improvement. Its fun but honestly you can learn more with an actual guide. This can ID some animals and plants but it has a hard time with some like Red-Tailed Hawks because of the overlap in other buteo species. Also, if you need to change your phone your entries do NOT stay with your account and you have to start all over again. It’s annoying if you are trying to list species or want to keep track and remember what youve seen. I only would recommend this app to help you ID something you have no clue about and cant find it in a book.

Can’t even do basic identifications. The app couldn’t identify any part of a tomato plant and called it a gourd. It didn’t even recognize a leaf. Google image identification is more accurate.

Excellent App but doesn’t use the camera to fill potential. It’s a great app but the camera functionality could use some work as it doesn’t do a great job of focusing on the subject, if I take a picture I can get a much clearer shot then using the app.

Improper identification. Improper identification and also takes a while for the camera to take the picture when it’s on a mammal for some time.

Invasive. Does not seem to identify highly invasive non-native plant material

My favourite app. Lots of negative reviews on here are outdated, I think. This app has improved greatly over the years. I like the link to the iNaturalist app (my other favourite app) any thought of linking them further. For the rare time it’s difficult to scan something, it would be nice if after loading to iNat and species confirmed by a few people that it would be added to my observations list in seek. Would help for something that has species that look very similar (like gulls)

Love it!. This app is so amazing for identifying plants animals and everything in between. My one recommendation is if it could identify rocks and crystals that would be helpful but otherwise it’s amazing!

Sadly and Frustratingly Unreliable. I wish, wish, wish that the identifying tech was better because I want to use this regularly so badly. But photos I take — good, clear quality photos readily accepted by other apps — are only useable maybe 20% of the time. It’s so frustrating to have a photo considered “research-quality” on iNaturalist not be recognized on this app. This app seems like Pokémon Go but for natural species and it would be so fun. Really disappointed.

It sucks. It takes everything from Wikipedia and told me the a prickly bush was a rose

Not recognizing. I run a crystal clear photo through. Then, the results keep coming back as unable to identify. I even tried a zoomed version and same results occur. Please, create an update to fix this problem!!

Does not handle the larger text display zoom setting well. Causes layout issues like the camera close button being partialled obscured by the time.

Excellent companion app to iNaturalist. In this day and age where funding for science is thrown on the back burner, citizen science has never been more important! I used this app when it first came out and it was buggy but I loved the concept! Fast forward a couple years later and it’s really really good! I don’t like the auto pic when it IDs as the picture comes out blurry but it’s easily disabled. Great app! As a hobbyist naturalist I really enjoy it.

Misidentification. This app is really bad. It cannot tell the difference between a cat and a dog from a clear photograph. With its inability to correctly classify a simple house pet, I would not trust it to accurately classify anything.

Good game. Because my kids are always so curious about things and get to know what they are!

Can’t identify in forest. Can’t differentiate between plants

Not working. I downloaded it, and when I clicked on the app, it goes to it for a second, and then goes back to my home screen. Please fix it. Thank you

Wrong one. When I scanned my cat, it identified him as a “domestic dog”. He is very big and fluffy, not to mention has unique markings, but you can obviously tell that he is not a dog. Otherwise, the app is pretty good. I like the whole badge thing and that it’s free.

Wouldn’t work. Every single photo I tried didn’t work it said they couldn’t identify any of the photos even when I did different angles and different shots.

Magnifique. Cette application est magnifique precise et très instructif Merci

Not useful except for absolute beginners.. This app is unable to identify basic, clear photos of plants in situ even with obvious visual clues. It often will not even suggest Latin names or proper taxonomy. It can identify plants down to the genus only about 60 percent of the time but won’t attempt to suggest possible specific species level identifications, cutting beginners off from doing their own investigation. Not good at all about IDing bugs or fungi except for the most iconic and basic species IE monarch butterflies, leopard frogs. Does not allow you to suggest your own identification or provide tools for further investigation even to help the app “””learn””” or improve which it does not seem to do. Go to the library and refine your hard field skills via research and then apply the learning in the wild is all I can suggest, this app is a waste of time for all but beginners and children. It won’t even give you leads if it can’t ID something. Remember- the best way to learn is to get out there and use your eyes. Apps can only help so much.

Amazingly accurate, creatively awful UI. Astonishing. At every turn, this application manages to have the most unwilledly, irrelevant, cluttered distractions on their homepage. Even listing previous “snapshots” is confusing. This metaphor of “pictures” as “bookmarks” of previous searches is unclear. The UX designers could not have crammed in more inconveniences. Hooray results, boo app design.

😊. i look at lot of plants 🌱 and seek is "professional ".

Pretty good. It’s pretty good but I keep trying to get my chickens but it says that they’re Red jungle fowl when they are marans

Not working. The app just crashes every time I open the camera…

Seek is the best. Seek is the best

Works really well!. This app works much better than a lot of reviews say. It’s able to identify lots of different plants and animals in my area... and at no cost! Great app and highly recommend it for discovering new species.

Loved the old version. I don’t want to have to use location to save what I find. I have all the apps like this one and have for the past year only used this one because it didn’t make me give my location, well, now it does. Disappointed to say the least.

Fantastic, needs QOL. Absolutely love this app. So much fun identifying and learning all about the life around me I never would have known about otherwise, seems to be pretty accurate most of the time too. My only complaint is I want the ability to reject/delete an identification on the identification screen so when it does misidentify them it’s easy to say so.

Satisfying. Curiosity about the natural world is rewarded with this app. Simple to use, the interface makes good use of your camera and remembers your observations.

Wrong identification. I am living in Quebec (Canada) and from the 6 plants wild plants I presented to it, none of them where rightly identified.

Can’t upload photos anymore.. This app used to be good but recently I can’t choose one of my photos from my library to upload. When I go to the camera in app and choose library the screen goes blank. I can’t get out of this screen and have to force close the app. This is extremely frustrating. Please fix this.

Wanna be nature photographer. I love this app for what it teaches me about the flora and fauna around me. I have a whole new level of appreciation for nature photographers and videographers and the level of patience required to get a good shot. The app is a little finicky about identifying pics sometimes, but for the most part it’s good fun documenting and learning about my surroundings.

Plz add this. This app is awesome but when I try common fruits,it can’t identify. Also plz add a setting where you can type an animal and click add to collection because I have seen a lot of animals I didn’t take a picture of

Good ummm but. I scanned my golden retriever dog and it thought my dog was a giant panda it’s really well weird fix it please?

Toxic community. I have never participated in a more demeaning aggressive toxic and all around negative community in my life I contributed for over a year to have 90% of my observations i know a correct be altered to something it’s clearly not by an aggressive community who it seems wants to show off their inability to identify animals. I proved this by legitimately taking a picture of a painting of a grey heron and the community gave me all sorts of negative comments saying i had no business identifying animals because its obviously a great blue heron till i reposted the picture with the title show of grey heron. And i said that i cant participate in this toxicity anymore. Not worth the time. Good concept bad execution.

Observations don’t sync. I got a new phone and my observations are gone even though I use the same account. Then I read in the app it doesn’t save observations. I now have no insensitive to keep observing as I’d have to start over.

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Great App!!. This is a fabulous app! I use it all the time for work. It is fast, it is super easy to use, and gives great information. The only reason I give it 4 stars is because when I open it up and push camera to identity something, it has warning pop up to be aware of your surroundings, be careful, etc. This is useful and good advice, but it also wastes valuable time in trying to get your camera on something. If it is an animal you are trying to identify, like a lizard or something which is usually in motion, this seems to be just long enough to prevent completion of identification. It would be great if there was the option to turn off the message.

A real life Pokédex.. It’s super cool, and fairly accurate. One thing it NEEDS: the ability to manually input a species. So often I’ll get the camera to get to genus level, and I know exactly what species I’m dealing with, but I can’t just tell it what it is so I can get credit. This is very common with herptiles and insects, as well as birds and mammals at distance, which the program isn’t very good at identifying through cell phone cameras. For example, I have several photos of a nearby salamander, and although it’s the ONLY salamander within a hundred miles, I can’t get the program to identify it no matter what quality, angle, or zoom of photo I upload — DSLR or phone camera — thus I’ll never get my amphibian credit for it.

Animal & plants. So now I’m almost on top of a swan...tells you it’s a swan but won’t Add because it can’t identify which kind. Also identified a hippo as a west Indian manatee..seriously??? Third comment....still not impressed with new updates, 10 feet away from bright red cardinal & still doesn’t recognize, keep workin on it guys. Neat little app, if you can get it to recognize things, in a lot of cases you have to be almost on top of the animal for it to be recognized....don’t think I’m going to do that with some of the things here in Florida Second rating, needs a little work is an understatement, terrible identification of animals, tells u to zoom in & when you do still cannot identify, then tells you to take another photo & get closer, obviously they’ve never been chased by an angry goose, and never mind that it’s too late, deleting.

Full of bugs. Update: pictures finally started showing up. Maybe they were downloading in the background? It didn’t ask me if I wanted to download anything so this is somewhat concerning, luckily I was on WiFi. However now my main complaint is the “about” section for each animal cuts off after a certain number of characters. There is no option to click more or view on the web. The text just stops and if you want more info I guess you have to go look it up yourself! Just downloaded this for the first time today. I can see thumbnails of animals when I look at a category, for example reptiles. However when I click on any of them to get more info NONE of them have photos! Every single one gives me a black box that says “no photos found for this species.” Major bug, definitely needs work!

Suddenly less cool. I’ve been using Seek forever and really enjoying it. Some things it has always needed are a social aspect; the ability to share lists with friends and compete would make it even more fun. However, in the last month or so, the apps functionality has cratered, especially with plants. Identifications that should be clear and immediate often don’t get down past “dicot” or “monocot”. Really, seek, thank you for telling me this oak tree isn’t actually grass or a lily, but I was kind of hoping (and had come to expect) for more specificity. I don’t know what the issue is, but it’s becoming frustrating enough to stop using the app.

Recognizes things but takes a long time. Seek correctly identifies stuff occasionally but it takes so long. I’ve come to depend on Apple’s way of identifying stuff in photos. It’s just, if not more, accurate and faster than Seek by a lot. If you could also have multiple photos of one organism stored in the photos and identified as the same thing it would be great. For example I could have a picture of a swallowtail butterfly caterpillar and the adult butterfly but when I open the observations tab and click on swallowtail butterfly I can scroll through the photos and see both of my pictures of the caterpillar and butterfly.

So This App Is Great. I Just Wish It Could Identify Other Complicated Animals. I love this app. I just wish it showed like, the whole tree of where it came from! For example- Kingdom-Animalia Phylum-Chordata Family- Felide Species- panthera Tigris I honestly just wish this app was more specific. But I love the app otherwise. If you want a specific app for these things, I wouldn’t recommend this one. Also, this app can’t identify a photo of a BOX JELLYFISH. Please fix that since even I bet my dog could know what a box jellyfish looks like. Thank you for reading and I hope you do these things!!

Fun and easy to use but. - When an observation is made, it displays an excerpt from the species’ Wikipedia page. However, the excerpt is truncated and doesn’t include a link to the full article, forcing you to manually open your web browser and type the species’ name. - Camera within the app doesn’t have zoom other other image controls which can make it difficult to photo insects and other small species. - Most critical reviews I’ve seen only discuss the identification accuracy of the app and not the app’s functionality as a whole. But that’s fair since it is the app’s primary feature after all. However, the accuracy seems fine for me as a casual user; I’m not working on a biology thesis.

Would be five stars, but. . .. Let me start by saying that I wish I could LOVE this app, but I definitely like it a lot. - One of the issue is, I’ve gotten right in the face of several insects, gotten fantastic pictures, and the app still fails to identify them. - The second issue is the lack of information contained within the app. I think I, along with others care less about what kingdom, family, etc etc an animal is in, and are more concerned with “is it dangerous?” Or “is it helpful to have around.” - The last issue I have is again, lack of information. If I am hiking, or camping, or hunting or whatever and I need to know if a plant or animal is safe to eat, that info is nowhere to be found. I understand adding all this stuff would make the app size massive, but it would make it so much better and informative. All that being said, I love identifying living things around me and the app does a great job (most of the time) with that. I just wish there was more to the identification screen.

Great and fun app but lots of issues. First off, this is a really fun app. It’s great to use with children, with friends, or on your own when out and about in nature. There is all sorts of challenges that you can try out to find all the necessary organisms to get badges and achievements. The problems come into play when identifying or trying to identify an organism. The camera associated with the app isn’t very responsive at times. Better to use your phones own camera and then upload the photos for identification, if it will identify the items from the photo you took. The species identification also becomes a problem. Sometimes it takes the camera a good while to identify a species or when trying to focus on just one organism surrounded by others. Also, identification can be a bit off at times saying that an organism is something that it is not. Most of the time it’s something similar or in the same family, but many times it will come up and give the wrong species or names. (Example: an ibis was identified as a spoonbill.) This is still a fun app and doing the challenges is exciting. I still recommend it but the issues are pretty bothersome.

Slowly Becoming Obsolete. Used to be amazing, but y’all have not kept up with the app. The software is absolutely diabolical. You can expect the app to shut down, or freeze your phone, every time you use it. The identifications have become severely unreliable, and that is partly the fault of iNaturalist not curating citizen identifications properly. Almost every plants photo gallery on iNat with be 25% completely wrong. That creates an algorithm that cannot be trusted. Seek can no longer identify the most common and simple wildlife, the same wildlife it was once able to accurately iD. Additionally, it does NOT work offline. At all. It will, however, drain your battery of all life. Fix this app. You have way too many people using iNat & Seek to be so lazy about your updates & software. My friend and I tested Seen with Picture This, because I was sure Seek was superior. Picture This was able to identify a bottlebrush (super common landscape plant in Texas) within 15 seconds. I sat with my phone out, capturing the plant at all different ridiculous angles, for at least 3 minutes. It couldn’t identify even the genus of this plant. That is absolutely pathetic.

This app is amazing. I love the Seek app. There are some minor enhancements needed to go full five star. It would be great if there was a toggle setting to auto snap when I get to species with the camera. Often I get a fleeting moment moving around a subject where I see it light up the last dot then I lose it when I tap the screen to snap the photo. It is amazing that I can identify subjects when offline. However, there is no way for me to go back and upload to iNaturalist when I get back to civilization. Please add a batch upload feature to share all observations for the day/week etc. Thanks for creating something that was so needed for citizen scientists!

Good solid app. Great app. It has actually helped me slow down on my hikes. I only have two items for the devs. The first one is to continue working on the recognition. Sometimes, no matter how many angles, how many zooms, it fails to get down to species. This is true for some very strong specimens. The other is speed. Yes, I’d like to identify quickly but it would be a big help if there was a setting so when the app opened, it was directly using the camera. Right now, having to go thru the opening screen, then the main screen, tapping the camera, tapping again to get rid of the “remember” screen is problematic. By the time I get thru all that, any animal is long gone.

Works well for identifying, but fails at teaching. I have loved this app for a couple years now. My main complaint is that it doesn’t remember that it’s open so when I switch apps to it, it restarts and takes 30 seconds to get ready. Hiking with a group and repeatedly having to make up 30 seconds is tiring. I also wish the observation list could be sorted in different ways. It sorts from most recently identified new species to oldest. Mostly I wish I could find what I saw that day, rather than just the new ones that day. Also now that I’ve sighted nearly 1000 species, finding one in my list is a long scroll. Annoyingly, if I think I found the one I want and open it then close it, I get jumped all the way back to the top - ouch! I’d love to be able to review and better remember what I’ve seen, but this app works hard to prevent that, but could be fixed. It would also be cool to enhance with a quiz of what you’ve seen. Also wish I could see pictures at full screen instead of the tiny postage stamp it gives. I know that’s more storage but phones have more now than when this came out.

IF YOU LOVE NATURE GET THIS APP. I am obsessed with this app, this is my new favorite app no doubt about it. This is such an amazing and easy to use app. The only issue I have with it is that it uses up my battery pretty quick, though that could just be my iPhone 6 lol. Anyway though, I am obsessed with this app and wouldn’t just recommend it to people who love nature, because it could definitely sway some people into loving nature. I have learned so much about minute mosses, fungi, and other organisms just in my backyard. Definitely fun for kids, but also amazing for adults!

Hands down best organism identifier!. This app is the number one organism identifier. There’s no subscriptions, no free trials, no in-app purchases, no premium version, just point the camera at any living thing and it will identify it for you! It also connects to iNaturalist, which lets you post your observations to a map and researchers use them. Even if it can’t identify what exact species something is, it can tell you the class, order, and genus as well. If you’ve ever looked at a bug and thought, what the heck IS this thing, I recommend this app.

Buggy, Needs Improvement. I honestly want to like this app, but it is far too problematic to give it anything more than two stars. Frequent bugs including graphical, loading, hangs and crashes plague this application in its current version, and seriously hamper the user experience. Further, it would be nice if the user could suggest species type when the proper genus has been identified, but Seek has problems narrowing it down to genus type. At least allow the user to flag it (as a genus at a minimum), even if there is no badge awarded for doing so. I sincerely hope that iNaturalist improves the interface (it’s not bad, but could be better), and eliminate the numerous bugs along with the AI image database for better identification, the sooner the better, and the more stars they’ll earn. That being said, thank you for the free app, despite the development challenges.

Best plant ID app out there. I’ve tried probably a dozen apps that claim to ID plants and this one is the easiest to use and most accurate. It doesn’t always get an ID and it sometimes flashes a species name for a second then goes back to genus. However, what I love about it is that once it figures something out you can look at its profile and it tells you whether it is native or not to your region, which is really all I care about when tryin to figure out which weeds to pull and which ones to leave. I do wish you could store more than one photo of a plant though. It would be helpful to compare in different seasons/stages of growth.

Fun but not great. First use in my own yard Seek misidentified 8 out of 25 plant attempts. It also could not get past Genus in 6 attempts- ex: it identified a Kelly Fern as Genus Fern but not which species of fern. This happened on all azaleas, rhododendrons, Leyland Cypress, roses and rose bushes. It could be that these plants have so many varieties that the app can’t drill down that far or photos won’t distinguish but still I haven’t left my yard & it’s accuracy is 17 out of 25. I wanted an app to tell me plants and things I don't know while hiking etc & not rely on me to know better than the app!! I’m going to try another app with the same plants in our yard to see if there’s a better one. Also/ if it miss identifies your pic I can’t find any way to delete the misidentification!!

Great app - it’s like playing a game in nature. It’s hard for me not to give this app 5 stars. It’s free and incredibly cool. What’s not to love there? It’s certainly not perfect: you sometimes have to get really close to things to get a good read (making it nearly impossible for anything that’s not a plant), I’ve noticed that it has a hard time with trees and fungi, and I wish it had options in the app to zoom in. Still, it is free and it seems they constantly trying to make it better. It makes going out for a walk or hike even more fun. We’ll walk by some berries and wonder if they’re edible, so we look it up and then hit the link to Wikipedia that’s built into it. Seriously cool app. Thank you for this.

Best of the best. I just downloaded this app there has been a plant that for 3 years I’ve owned my home I haven’t been able to identify even with other apps and I’m asthmaticly allergic to it if I cut it I can’t breathe because the smell literally within 2 minutes of using this app I found out what it was so I could figure out the best way to get rid of it permanently than I scanned a random flower within 20 seconds I knew what it was now it’s turned into fun exercise and my 7 year old who is always asking what’s that it’s a fun thing for him as well great way to explore outdoors

Awesome app that has room for improvement!. Such a great way to figure out what things around you are in real-time! Identification can sometimes be tricky, especially noticed with younger plants and some animals/bugs if you don’t zoom in enough it may not recognize anything. Would also love a way to save pictures taken in the app to a specific folder to make them easier to manage (or add Shortcut functionality so users could do that themselves). I would also love better integration with iNaturalist and to be able to follow up more easily on pictures you submitted to help with research.

Back up PLEASE! / Premium?. I totally use this app all the time! I am a nature person and this app helped me take that to the NEXT LEVEL! It is awesome! I shared it with a lot of friends and now we share and compete with our observations. We all love it... BUT... While understand that there are a lot of technical difficulties related to it, but in the world we live in when changing phones is constant, not having a way to back up is soooo SAD. I have entered a lot of observations and a lot of badges and now I need to change iPhone (like every few years). I understand that app development has challenges and is not free, but there is not a way to support the developers(or at least not visible enough for me to see it yet). Maybe adding a premium or an option to donate could help further development. I have seen a lot of people that totally love the app! It is a 5star easy with some sort of backup. It would be great you could add that option or share if it’s on the planning of the app. That way at least I can hold on to my old phone. I love it so much.

Biology Nerd’s Addiction. I’m a total bio geek and this app is perfect! I love taking it on vacation. I can just snap a pic of something and it’ll tell me what it is, which blows my mind. It will save your pic for you in addition to giving you some info about the critter/plant. There’s no gimmicks and I’m not constantly being asked to pay for something. Only issue I’ve had so far: It can be a little hard to get the pic right. Sometimes you have to play around with the zoom. Sometimes it just doesn’t recognize it which can be disappointing. Overall, I love everything about Seek. One of my favorite apps.

Fun to Use. I really enjoy learning about the wildlife around me and when the app works it's great. Sometimes the information is spot on and I discover something new around me. Sometimes the app fails to recognize what I'm aiming at. I was trying to see if the app could identify some week-old hybrid piglets. The response only got as close as Mammal. When I tried again, it came up as Squirrel. When I tried a third time and it came up as Tiger, I really began to doubt the accuracy of other identifications. Aside from wishing there was more information about each species, I've been very happy to have this app.

Please fix it!. This app used to be incredible, it would accurately identify almost anything although it really only worked when using the live camera. Within the past year it’s become much slower at identifying things, often never getting past family or briefly saying the genus and then going back to just the order. And when it does come up with an answer, it’s not always right. Very often lately it tells me the plant I’m looking at is one that doesn’t even grow on my continent. I used to trust this app much more than other ones like Picture This for plants, especially because it would stop at genus or family if it wasn’t sure instead of just making a best guess like Picture This does. But now I take everything it says (if it even identifies the plant at all) with a grain of salt.

Maybe ok for plants but not animals. I like that it tells me what items to look for around me, but that’s where it’s usefulness stopped. I was really expecting more of a license plate search (check it off the list) kind of situation. I have rarely gotten a photo of an animal that it “accepts”. So even though I see an animal, unless they are stationary and fully visible (not partially obscured by trees, rocks, other natural habitat elements...) it won’t accept your photo or mark the item as seen/found. As wildlife is wild, and approaching wildlife is not only unwise, but in some cases illegal, expecting a non zoomable Iphone photo to meet those requirements for the casual nature observer renders this app useless to me. My kids were unable to record the elk, foxes, whales, eagles, bears, etc that we saw on our Alaska trip unless we saw them in a zoo. Missed opportunities. Wasted time with the app.

Privacy Danger. The default in both Seek and iNaturalist is to have a open/public pinpoint location on all submissions. This is particularly a problem for children who may be predominantly taking photos in their backyard AND Seek doesn't offer ANY option to obscure a photo's specific GPS location. A user must remember to manually everytime change the setting to "obscure" in order to not publicize where they're at. This _is_ a problem even if scientists who want to use that data are getting huffy that other people's data isn't as granular as they'd like (if you need pinpoint, reach out to the data provider and ASK PERMISSION).

Such a great resource!. First off, I wanted to give the app 5 stars, but I have noticed a few issues with misidentification. There are also times it seems impossible to reach the Species level of identification. I’ve been walking for my health but staying motivated isn’t always easy. Once I started using Seek I had perfect motivation: I want to complete challenges, earn badges and of course satisfy my curiosity about nature. Once the small issues with identification are corrected it will be a 5 star app for sure! Maybe a helpful hints option could be added to the menu to help with getting those species identifications.

It’s just cool. I don’t leave a lot of reviews, but had to give Seek some praise as it’s been an unexpected delight. I’m not a professional (or even amateur) naturalist, but merely someone who enjoys nature. As such, this has been a fun app to play with, successfully recognizing all but one of the species I’ve attempted to log so far. (Only about 20, it’s early going.) I now know what a “Gulf Fritillary” looks like — cool! That lizard I see everywhere? A brown anole! It’s fun and casually educational, a good thing. Getting the same notice screen every time the app opens is a tad annoying, and I’m sure the species database will grow with time. It can be difficult to get good phone photos of the more skittish creatures, but that’s not the app’s fault. Overall - well done!!

Really fun app. I downloaded this on a teacher suggestion and I’ve been using it nonstop ever since. Whenever I go out and spot some thing, and take a picture of it and show my friends. Also, when I go on vacations it’s cool to be able to see all the different kinds of animals and plants they have there. The only thing that’s a bit frustrating is that sometimes it’s hard to get it to recognize the animal because it’s blurry, bad lighting, or doesn’t recognize it, but that is to be expected with any app and I think overall it’s a great app.

Great app for kids! Even old kids!. I do like this app! It can be frustrating, and I try to take photos without app and then identify photo because my photos are terrible with app. I read you have improved it. Good. When it can’t identify I will put it in iNat with the comment “Seek can’t identify “, so hopefully there’s a link for iNat to teach Seek. I also post on Fieldguide to Everything, and Seek is entered into how identified. As it was developed for children, I appreciate NOT keeping photos, but, then again, frustrated when photos disappear when I delete them from phone. Sorry, no clue on how to make me happy on that! Definite winner! Easy to entertain yourself and the kids!

Very good app with a couple suggestions. I use this app all the time, mostly to identify the assorted plants, insects, and spiders that appear in my yard. It has helped very much with getting to know what almost everything is. I would appreciate if they added the option to limit IDs at a given time- like if I’m trying to ID an insect or spider that is on a leaf, let me say this is an insect or spider identification so it doesn’t keep identifying the plant it’s on. It would also be nice to be able to reject IDs when they happen as sometimes they are obviously incorrect. It will give multiple different IDs for the same thing and save them all to your observations.

This app saved my cloths, carpets and other things like that. So, my family had these weird bugs in our house we kept killing them but they kept coming back, and shortly after that my teacher was telling us to download load seek not for any reason just to look for animals and stuff so on the weekends I found more and I was like “WHAT ARE THESE THINGS” so I downloaded seek and took a couple of tries but found out they were varied carpet beetles so I read about them on seek them and went to do a deep dive immediately I found a website on how to get rid of them but it is all thanks to the amazing seek definitely buy for any inventions in the the future

All around great app!. I’m really enjoying using this app! It’s great quality, especially considering it’s free. There are a few things that would make it better though; for example adding a link to the Wikipedia page for each species. Granted, I can Google the species myself but a link would be a nice touch. Also I find that the app has a hard time identifying tall trees, which is what I’m principally interested in. It would be really cool if the identified trees had separate pictures of their bark, leaves, flowers, and seeds. But overall I can’t complain, keep up the great work!

Super fun but frustrating. I love this app a lot, I think the concept is great. It’s made me wonder a lot more about nature and it’s almost like a scavenger hunt to find more species. However, I’ve submitted obvious photos of different fungi and plants from my camera roll and they still cannot recognize it. I sent a clear picture of a pink rose and it said it wasn’t able to identify. I also have to spend an unreasonable amount of time and effort to get this app to identify something. I don’t know if this app is new or not— if it is, I understand. But it’s frustrating to be curious about a species and have it be unidentifiable. It happens more often than not. I hope this app gets more funding or something so it can identify species with more ease and efficiency.

Could be improved. I love this app, and I can see it going really far, but right now it’s simply not there. I’d love to be able to help the app identify things by giving it information (for example, if it can see that a plant is mint, but can’t figure out what kind, it could prompt with questions to help discern what mint it is). Along those lines, I’d also like to see you be able to put in your own things, because sometimes getting pictures, especially of more skiddish animals and fish) is hard! If I know I saw a robin, I could take a picture and log it independently, and that might even help improve seeks algorithm. I’d also like to see some social aspect, like the ability to look at what your friends see, or a local chatboard to help identify things the app can’t.

So disappointed. I was so excited to find this app and have used it a lot. Until today when I deleted it because it is so annoying. I rarely get a plant recognition and when I do, it takes a long time to get it. I did learn that the invasive weed in my yard is spurge and I did learn that the bird on the wire in another State is a mockingbird. This app couldn’t identify a pumpkin (kept telling me it’s a mushroom) and many other plants, both known and unknown to me. Trees, shrubs, grasses, and weeds never got past “dicots.” I’m in the process of planning my yard remodeling and have attempted to use this app extensively to identify trees and shrubs I’ve seen in parks that I wanted to research for yard compatibility- but it’s been most unhelpful. I’m not going to allow myself to be frustrated by this app anymore. I deleted it. So disappointing.

Seek by iNaturalist. I say that Seek is a decent app, but needs some improvements. For example, it doesn’t always get very accurate identifications, and once it identified a harbor seal in Boston harbor as (and I quote) ‘we believe this is a member of chordates’. A chordate is a type of fish. The closest it got that time was ‘true seals’. That proves the sometimes incorrectness of Seek. But it is also accurate sometimes. I myself have gotten to the top level, and fortunately, most of my observations have been true, or at least close to accurate. But since I am just an eleven year old girl, not a researcher or scientist, it doesn’t matter a whole lot whether it’s accurate or not, but if I were, that would be not very good because then I would need the exact identification, so that is why I give Seek by iNaturalist 4 out of 5 stars.

Fun app, opportunities for improvement. This is a fun app and I think great for kids. An area for improvement is the camera interaction with the phone and the speed of recognition. When I’m trying to take a picture the app doesn’t juggle cameras the way the iPhone can so can’t adjust focus and identify well the object. Thus recognition of an item itself can be slow. This makes identifying birds, insects, anything likely to move, very challenging. So makes me give up. It’d be nice if recognition could also happen on the backend, post-photo. Many of our fun natural world animals we want to ID are long gone by the time I get to a photo. But I love the idea and badges and achievements are great. Maybe the badges and achievements should not require a grim identification. That might make it better too.

This app saved my cat’s life. I downloaded the app to id plants and animals while traveling but it was a life saver today. My cat had gotten into a potted plant at my parents’ house yesterday and I had taken a photo to identify the plant with the Seek app. Today, she figured out a way to get back into the plant and not just sniff around but devoured it. Because of the Seek app photo, I was able to check with pet poison control, knowing what the plant was and exactly how much she had consumed, the quantity was enough to damage her kidneys. We got to the emergency vet asap and they helped her purge the leaves she ate and she’s completely fine now thanks to Seek!

Loved for YEARS, now completely inaccurate!. I have raved about Seek and recommended to to everyone I know for a looong time, used it with students I teach (middle school science), generally have benefitted greatly from this app and been a huge fan. It was incredibly accurate... UNTIL about a month ago, when the accuracy completely plunged, to almost zero! I don't know what Cal Academy / iNaturalist / the developers did to the ML algorithm, but whatever it was is WAY WORSE. It now almost never identifies down to species, even for plants I know have very distinctive morphological features that Seek would previously have recognized. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE revert back to the old recognition algorithm, until you can further refine whatever you replaced it with. I miss this app and don't want to use a different one but it's essentially non-functional now :( :( :(

Often won’t identify a plant past order or family. I love this to identify plants when it works, but sometimes for the simplest plant, one that even I know, it won’t even come close to identifying it further than being a monocotyledon or dicot. Sometimes it will identify it as a different plant entirely if I try a new shot. I get so frustrated after trying and retrying view after view, only to be disappointed. Since it is free, I keep trying to use it and sometimes get positive results. I do like that the app gives information about the plant it does identify. I do appreciate all the hard work that must have gone in to develop this app. I certainly could not have done it!

Gonna keep using it but.... Needs better support for the newer phones cameras. Especially the macro setting. Camera is wonky in app and doesn't take advantage of camera settings. Not being able to zoom in on photos once snapped for bugs on plants is annoying, it just identifies the plant and ignores the bug. Need that and would be 5 stars all day long even with the other issues. Also needs an easier way to delete identified things instead of just automatically updating your badges and stuff with the wrong thing. Love the concept. This might be great if the keep updating. Btw using an iPhone 13 Pro Max.

Can get better. A pretty good app that is hopefully going to get better. He seems to have a problem focusing my phone camera. Apparently it does not access all of the abilities of the phone camera. Take one shot to identify. Then take other better photos with the phone, camera, app, or other camera, then upload your photos to a iNaturalist manually. Unsurprisingly, there has been some fairly egregious mis-identifications. This should only improve over time. I also do not like that switching away to another app from iSeek causes loss of the current observation. This means you have to start over. Not good.

Picture quality needed not very doable on cell phone. I’ve taken pictures of my hibiscus with myself and just the flower it says it’s some kind of Hibiscus and can’t figure it out so it doesn’t add it into whatever. it only has a small number of flowers and bugs and everything else, it doesn’t have what I was expecting in there to be seen. I’ve taken pictures of a hummingbird several times and it says it’s some kind a hummingbird it can’t seem to tell me what kind or even add general hummingbird to the list that they may have a hummingbird listed as something in my area. But when I sent one of the pictures on Facebook to a government website that deals with animals in this area and Wood and stuff they knew what it was it was the female and they tell me what species. Very disappointed

It’s a start, but needs a few things. I love using this app and learning about the local flora and fauna. However, I think there could be some improvements like: -Camera loads slowly. Usually animals run off before I can get a picture. I just use he normal phone camera now and upload it to seek later. -Needs more taxonomic rankings like crustaceans, worms, etc. Right now these things just fall under “other” -If you take a photo and upload it to your seek observations, it should stay there permanently. If you delete the photo from your phone library, the photo is also deleted from seek. -When you do delete a photo from your phone, your observations still remain in your account...but they’re no longer associated with any image. Not even stock photos.

This is AMAZING ! But sometimes frustrating. I really love this app, and with no in-app purchases or ads it's even better. I definitely want to donate to help keep it running ! The only problem is it can't correctly identify certain animals no matter how clear I get the picture or how many different angles I try. I have a green cheek conure and two rats. I wanted to document them in my app so I tried doing my conure first. He is very mild mannered and sat perfectly still for me, yet I still couldn't get a correct species for him. Best I could get was a parakeet, and conures look nothing like parakeets... The rats have more energy obviously, but I managed to get good, clear angles of them; yet the app kept identifying them as guinea pigs. This just worries me, because I was hoping to use this app to learn more about insects but how can I be sure it can tell the difference between something like a brown recluse and a wolf spider ? I do love this app and I'll keep using it, the technology is incredible, I almost can't believe it. I just know it can do better !!

Fun. For those of you who are saying you want to write in field notes, manually enter names, etc, you should use the main iNaturalist app and site. (It also has crowd sourced ID). That’s not the point of seek. Seek is supposed to be a fun game where you go out and try to “catch” different species and it works well for that. Because the algorithm is fed by iNaturalist research grade observations and those don’t include things like houseplants it is true it doesn’t always work for those. But it does sometimes. I got some houseplants to work. You are better off going outside and trying weeds and trees. It goes well with those.

Confusion?. I have had this app on my iPhone 7 for no less then a month. First, I’d like to say that the app is great! I had the setting where it would automatically snap a picture when it identified it. We live in the woods, so there are a lot of trees and, for this particular oak tree in the front yard, my phone thought that the oak tree was an Emu. And, the camera gets fuzzy when it gets too close, and it does not do this on the normal camera app, and when I re-focus it it still stays fuzzy. I don’t know if this is just my iPhone, but it happens a lot. No other problems, though! Great app!