Seek by iNaturalist

This app makes me want to go outside and find things in the real world, resulting in as much extra walking as Pokémon did. Like that game, you can find life in the wild and collect them by using the camera to identify them, thus adding them to your collection. It's also very useful as it alerted me to the fact that the ant on my deck was a Carpenter ant!! I'd definitely recommend this app to anyone, though there is room for improvement. I'd love if you could add notes to the species after they're in your collection. I also love that you can send a photo to be identified by a naturalist, therefore helping to improve the app's identification skills, but it'd be nice if that species was then added to your observation list once it has been identified. This doesn't seem to happen, as several of the photos I've sent have been identified but don't show up for me in my own list. I'd also like it if you could choose which among the photos you've taken of a species is saved in your profile, since sometimes the first one you take is bad lighting or blurry. I'm sure the app will continue to improve, though, and in the meantime I think it's amazing that user submissions can help to do just that.

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.

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

ask user to change the rating

Ok so I really like this app. 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 the app 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 this app 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 this app perfect, please let the App 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 this app 5 stars. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

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!