Seek by iNaturalist

This app is often pretty helpful at identifying plants and animals, and is similar to Pokémon Go, except that it’s actually practical and teaches you stuff. That being said, there are a few issues. I’ve noticed that sometimes the app has a very hard time identifying particular species, including pine trees, bears, and crows, and is very ineffective at identifying deep sea creatures. Often it will misidentify things (leading to some pretty hilarious misidentifications, such as confusing a pheasant for a siamese fighting fish, a cougar for a dromedary camel, a clouded leopard for a leopard shark, and a kodiak bear for a domestic dog). Other times however, it can be pretty good at identifying some rather obscure organisms as well, so plusses and minuses. Currently my biggest issue with the app though (which is what prompted me to write this review) is the recent update. Before, it seemed as if it was easier to identify things through saved photographs than it was at identifying photos actually taken by the app’s camera. However, with one of the recent updates, the identifying previously saved photos on your device feature seems to have taken a serious downgrade, and now actually seems to do an even worse job than the actual in app seek camera. Could you guys at iNaturalist please fix this issue? Also, could you allow SeekApp to recognize and better identify certain plants and animals, particularly domestic pigs and deep sea creatures (I’m surprised the app doesn’t know what a pig is!)? Thank you!

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.

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