Seek by iNaturalist Reviews

by Greenpeaches247

Until recently, I’ve enjoyed using Seek 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 Seek 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 Seek 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 Seek until it can correctly identify ALL humans from ALL races.

by Old_grouse_herder

I should have known better than to download something iNaturalist was involved with after using that app, but this app was highly recommended by my employer. Seek 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 Seek !!! 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!

by Ucent247

I want to give 5 stars for a great concept but the flaws ruin Seek for me. The fact you can’t change the header photo for a sighting is ridiculous considering Seek 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 Seek’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.

by Person That Didn't Do This

Seek is pretty good, but it does need a lot of work. I downloaded this app after iNaturalist, because I wanted an app that immediately identifies the species for you instead of having to wait for others on Seek 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 Seek won’t let you zoom in, so I have to take a picture with my phone’s camera and then input the picture in Seek . Lastly, I wish Seek 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.

by Katw0627

I’ve had Seek 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 Seek 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 Seek 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 Seek has been mostly enjoyable and I hope it continues to evolve.

by Codrinb

I love Seek (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 Seek . 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.

by PhantomPhan

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 Seek 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.

by MurphMom10

When I first discovered Seek, 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 Seek, but wish there was a way to delete observations, and a way to save “incomplete” observations, even if it hasn’t reached species.

by Benjimatic

I just downloaded Seek 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 this app 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!

by Aray637

I love Seek. Use it everyday, mostly for botany related identification since I usually can’t tell a cactus from a cattail. Seek 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 Seek and use it daily. With a few tweaks it’ll be the perfect companion for any budding naturalist. 4/5 stars.

by M. Lucero

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 Seek 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 this app 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 Seek, but making these changes would drastically improve the user’s experience and motivate people to continue using Seek after upgrading to a new phone when many might give up on it upon learning they have to start from zero again.

by Languageandexpression

Seek 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 Seek 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, Seek to load and be ready to use, and then the camera warning to go away before I can use Seek for what I need it for quickly.

by Timmy1245

I’ve been using Seek 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 Seek 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” Seek 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.

by Dank327

I’ve been using Seek 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. Seek 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 Seek for anyone interested in nature.

by Dreamwords

I used Seek 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 this app 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 this app 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, this app 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.

by Skarm14

this app 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 Seek 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, Seek is near perfect for nature lovers like me!

by Annnnuuu

I love Seek. 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?

by Kaiaim

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 Seek 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 Seek 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 Seek 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

by Vampierre

I love Seek 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 Seek 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 Seek still can’t identify it. 3. it’d be cool if your observations on iNaturalist could transfer over to this app !! so that anything Seek can’t identify, i can just log myself.
Overall it’s a great app, i use it all the time and love it !! 🐸

by Dinoman77777

I love Seek I play Seek 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 Seek. 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.

by Bobby23 (from INaturalist)

this app 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 Seek .

The interface is great though - much better than the actual iNaturalist app and more aesthetically pleasing. It feels like this app 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.

by Hf1711

Ok so I really like Seek. It’s something g that I’ve needed all these years and just found. I would have given it five stars if it weren’t for one thing, which I hate so much that it brought down the rating by two stars. The fact that all the pictures taken are only stored in camera roll and not Seek itself. I have very limited storage space, so I automatically back up all my camera roll to google photos and then delete the pictures from camera roll. However, the way Seek works is that you won’t be able to see the pictures for the animals or plants you identified unless those pictures are saved in the camera roll. This is a huge problem for me because I take a lot of pictures and constantly have to delete my camera roll after backing them up in google photos. Developers, if you want to make Seek perfect, please let Seek itself store the pictures so u won’t have to keep them in my camera roll. If this is fixed in a future update, I would be more than happy to give Seek 5 stars. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

by Meesa Fishie

I say that this app 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 this app. 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 this app by iNaturalist 4 out of 5 stars.

by Young Paleontologist

I love Seek, and I can see it going really far, but right now it’s simply not there. I’d love to be able to help Seek 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 Seek can’t.

by Sizzles2289

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 Seek , 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 Seek 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!

by Cjep21

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 Seek 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. Seek 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.

by Cpprboom

When I got Seek 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 Seek about the organism you identified! That’s wonderful because you can learn right then and there without having to get out of Seek 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!