Seek
• Get outside and point the Seek Camera at living things
• Identify wildlife and plants you see and take pictures to earn badges
• Learn fun facts about the organisms all around you
OPEN THE CAMERA AND START SEEKING!
Found a mushroom, flower, or bug, and not sure what it is? Open up the Seek camera to see if it knows!
Drawing from millions of wildlife observations on iNaturalist, Seek shows you lists of commonly recorded insects, birds, plants, amphibians, and more in your area. Scan the environment with the Seek Camera to identify organisms using the tree of life. Add different species to your observations and learn all about them in the process! The more observations you make, the more badges you’ll earn!
This is a great app for families who want to spend more time exploring nature together, and for anyone who wants to learn more about the life all around them.
KID-SAFE
Seek does not require registration and does not collect any user data by default. Some user data will be collected if you choose to sign in with an iNaturalist account, but you must be over 13 or have your parents permission to do so.
Seek will ask permission to turn on location services, but your location is obscured to respect your privacy while still allowing species suggestions from your general area. Your precise location is never stored in the app or sent to iNaturalist.
Our image recognition technology is based on observations submitted to iNaturalist.org and partner sites, and identified by the iNaturalist community.
Seek is presented by Our Planet and WWF and created by the iNaturalist team. iNaturalist is a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. Seek was originally created with support from HHMI Tangled Bank Studios.
Category : Education
Reviews (24)
The idea is super nice, but the custom camera system is totally broken. It is laggy, hard to focus, slow to "deploy" and the CV struggles to get high confidence ID so the blurry pictures their custom camera system makes are useless and each weights a whopping 30mb (i understand it is a kind of rafale mode?). They should've kept the iNaturalist system. Using pictures from camera roll doesn't work either since you can't manually ID pictures :/.
Seek is great, especially when you also use iNaturalist a lot, as it can help ID or get a general idea of an organism and its easy to use. Some issues is that it uses up your battery quickly, can't focus for the life of it, poor quality when zoomed in (so good luck scanning anything that moves fast), camera sometimes doesn't open or work, but the issues aren't that bad with some waiting.
Great app, so much fun when it works. Not being able to store your data online really sucks- when my last phone broke I had to start over, which was sad because I had put a lot of time into it. The identifying feature is finnicky, but it's obviously a complex algorithm and I don't expect it to be perfect.
Not very good. Firstly, it runs EXTREMELY poorly on my phone. The camera doesnt open 80% of the time, it rarely auto focuses when it does, and it studders constantly, especially when trying to take a photo, it just loads and loads, then crashes, then loads and loads when you try again. Is the a achievement menu supposed to show anything? Because it is always blank, even when it says i should look at it. Also, fails to identify a good 75% of the time, very basic common plants, unable to identify.
Very frustrating app but I am persevering with it because the ethos behind it is important. It takes ages to use the camera. It can get the species for a split second but won't hold it long enough to capture the shot or it never gets anywhere near species even after 5 minutes of trying all angles. It's also really bad at using photos taken separately from the app. Crashes often & is clunky to use.
Seek offers a fantastically easy way to identify different kingdoms and species. While the identification can be rather difficult due to the fact you need a very clear image of the entity in question, once you have a good angle the app is able to provide you with all the information you need to know. The app provides a confidence meter at the top showing how confident it is when identifying it as a specific species or a more general identity. I've really loved how much this has educated me!
I love this app but lately I'm having technical difficulties with it. When I try to upload a picture to identify, it will not let me scroll through my pictures. It shows pictures to fill the screen, but I can't scroll down at all to get to the pictures I want to identify. I have uninstalled and reinstalled, I've tried everything. Going to have to get rid of the app if you can't fix it soon.
I love this app, and the more I use it, the more family likes it too. What would be a really neat feature is when identifying birds or other animals, it should have an option to hear the sound the bird or animal makes. Im no animal expert, but there should be an option for when there's a wrong identification so it doesn't save my observation incorrectly. I had one bird be identified and I knew just by looking at it, it was not correct.
I like the idea behind the app and have used it extensively for quite some time. Only issue i have is the camera quality is absolutely horrible. Ok quality if you are not zoomed in but the second you zoom in everything is unrecognizable. Only happens while using this app, camera works fine otherwise. This is on a Samsung s9. Hopefully one day they will fix the camera issues? Otherwise the app has become too frustrating, misidentifing many things or not able to so I do not use it much as of late.
Worked great on older Pixel 2 and Pixel 4a phones, but it REALLY struggles to identify species using the Pixel 6; probably only works 10% of the time on this phone. I'm really disappointed by this, because it used to be one of my most used apps, and now it is basically useless to me. It would also be awesome if there was tighter integration with iNaturalist, like the ability to post to iNaturalist if a species can't be identified by Seek.
the concept is nice however it's pretty bad at identifying things. it would benefit from user feedback being able to indicate how accurate an identification is and input the correct identification if it is wrong. the camera is also a bit blurry and has some delay to taking the photos so it can miss the shot if the subject moves.
I love the idea and the facts but it's possible this app was not optimized for Android. When "seeking" with my friend on her iPhone she is able to get to species faster and more often--I usually get stuck halfway! Gonna stick with it and hoping to see improvements in the future :)
Good for when you can give the app the photo... but I prefer to take lots of photos and then try and upload the the the app afterwards. There's an option to do this but the app won't let me scroll past the first few photos in my gallery, which is very annoying!
Samsung S22 Ultra: Unfortunately this app does not work on this device. The camera is slow and stutters, and the best ID I've gotten for almost every attempts is "Dicot"; it could not even ID Japanese knotweed. Very disappointing after being highly recommended. Maybe this is just an Apple-focused app?
love the app it needs some improvement but still is great definitely needs lighting to identify easily sometimes it can't find regular plants like roses or lemons or some trees it won't get bugs it doesn't seem to work on but most flowers and plants are awesome sometimes it will miss classify it and there will be 2 classifications for the same plant fun app though thank you
I scan my carrot sprout twice... it said it was lizard, then the next time it said it was a leaf cutter ant... there were no lizards nor ants... I tried the challange, it wanted me to find bees, found one, it kept detecting the flower the bee landed on (correctly, but if it's specifically asking for bees...) also if I know for a fact what the carrots are (because I planted them) I should be able to tell it what it is rather than just flag it as incorrect... also opt 4 swtch btwn bug & plant
Recently got a new phone (pixel 5a) and now the camera in the app doesn't focus properly. It seems to only want to focus on people. I have to put my hand by the object to get the focus to work, which is not ideal for a lot of organism IDs
Great app, few bugs ahem... I don't know why, but the apps control of the camera is woeful, the time to open the camera, zoom etc is really really slow. Making it difficult to capture faster moving specimens. Otherwise, a great app
Seems to struggle with identifying things often. I can do circles around the same tree for ten minutes and never get a definitive identification. I still use it quite often while playing Disc Golf.
this app is so much fun but the camera takes 4 seconds to focus and is really hard to use on pixel 6. especially with insects. good luck!
Really enjoying learning different species of plants and insects. Windy days and moving creatures can make for a tricky capture but still quite addicted to making new discoveries!
I downloaded this app for an assignment in a Biology class. The app couldn't even read large, close, clear pictures of insects and certain mushrooms. I lost points in the class due to the inadequacy of this app. The Seek developers should have a public disclaimer informing educators to not require its use for graded assignments.
I really enjoy this app! I do wish it would pick up on things more easily. I'm going with 4 stars because it could be "operator error" if the app works well for others (I haven't read reviews for a while now.
The concept is amazing! But I have a lot of bugs : when opening the camera the app shuts down, when I want to add a new observation I don't any possibility to register it once I got the identification and the performance of the algorithm is curiously less good than the iNaturalist one.