Seek by iNaturalist
Identify plants and animals
Total ratings
3.32
(Rating count:
9,662)Review summary
These summaries are automatically generated weekly using AI based on recent user reviews.
Google Play Store does not verify user reviews, so some user reviews may be inaccurate,
spammy, or outdated. Pros
- Ad-free experience
- Great organizational structure
- Useful for learning and identifying various species
- Contributes to scientific research through observations
- Fun and engaging for users of all ages
Cons
- Camera function is slow and frequently freezes or fails to focus
- Struggles with identification accuracy, often stopping at genus or family level
- Frequent crashes and bugs reported
- Limited ability to back up or transfer observations
- Misidentifications reported, including basic species errors
Most mentioned
- Camera issues (focus, lag, freezing)
- Inaccurate species identification
- Crashes and bugs
- Limited user interface features (no backup or download options)
- Great for learning but not reliable for precise identifications
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User reviews
Recent rating average:
3.00
All time rating average:
3.32
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| Date | Author | Rating | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-12-15 |  | | This app used to be great. Now it's terrible. It only IDs about 40% of the time, if that. It crashes all the time, the camera doesn't focus, the camera freezes, it doesn't ID past the genus, and it fails to identify even the most basic and common of plants. Also it constantly crashes. I'd give it less then 1 star in it's current state. Sad. It was a good solid 4 a couple years ago |
| 2024-10-22 |  | | This is a really fun, ad free app offered by a great organization. I've found that it works really well, only rarely failing to ID at the species level. The connectivity with iNaturalist is excellent and useful and helps contribute to scientific research This would be a 5 * review, but I can't backup or download my observations. I can do so from iNaturalist (I think) but not everything in Seek had been uploaded there and I can't do that after the fact. Otherwise, thanks for a fantastic app |
| 2024-09-12 |  | | It's not perfect, but it works pretty well to identify plants and animals. It's good with distinct features like flowers, but not so good at identifying plants from leaves, bark, etc. It can also be hard to find the right zoom level to use. Still, you have to expect that from ML systems. It's very impressive, and a lot of fun when you're out in nature. |
| 2024-09-02 |  | | Inaturalist is great, but I found seek to be very buggy (tends to freeze when taking a picture, then adds it to the list but does not count it towards challenges) and constantly misidentifies species, choosing ones that cannot be found in the area despite the city being correctly selected. It is probably great for children in USA or Europe, but less so elsewhere |
| 2024-08-14 |  | | This app used to be pretty good... anymore, though, it rarely can identify anything, and sometimes (I'll do this just to verify it's identification) it will give me different species using virtually the same shot angle of a plant or animal. Once, I had the seek camera open and it snapped a photo of someone's legs and labled it as an alpaca 🤣... that's still quite the joke among us to this day! I'd say this app has maybe a 40-45% accuracy rate when it actually gives an identification. |
| 2024-08-03 |  | | Not a bad app for identifying plants, insects, and other wildlife, but my experience with the latest version has been less than stellar: the camera functions in the latest version of the app are incredibly laggy compared to previous ones, and it hangs when I try to take a picture. |
| 2024-06-28 |  | | It is decenty good. However it struggles to identify clear species sometimes. For example, I found a dung beetle in a certain area, and there is only one dung beetle species in that area, but it could only identify up to dung beetle. You should be able to select the species from nearby species and it should also use that when identifying |
| 2024-06-22 |  | | It's great for identifying, but sometimes it takes a few seconds to get the picture, I would just stand there pointing the phone at a cat or lizard... It's awful when fast insects are involved... I don't have a professional camera :/ (I like the challanges though). PS: The app appears to be... Horrible... When identifying fishes, but there are no ads! So I guess I'll give it a 5-star review! Edit: I've downloaded the app again, it doesn't seem to even attempt to identify the creatures I picture |
| 2024-06-16 |  | | Originally rated 4/5 stars in 2022. It needs some improvement with insect ID, but it's pretty accurate with plants. It performs best in ideal lighting; the app struggles to make an ID in the shade. The workaround is to take a pic in your regular camera app, where you can adjust brightness or use flash, and then open the pic in the seek app. Update 6/2024: LOUD shutter sound when taking pics, & no option to disable‽ Have to silence notifications on your phone. Nobody asked for a shutter sound. |
| 2024-06-08 |  | | Pretty good app. It's useful if you want to find out something about a species, and it's well organized. But here's the downside. Sometimes when I try to identify a species it, 1, doesn't do anything and nothing pops up. Or 2, it gets stuck on Family or Class, and it won't do anything else, and then I have to use Google, which sometimes also isn't helpful. It also sometimes can't identify simple things that even I know. Please fix this. Other than that, great app. |
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