Seek by iNaturalist
reviews and complaints

It can sometimes be stupid. You should know that before reading that sentence because that is also the title of this review. It thought a chair was a peacock and my dad’s butt was a moth.
And it should have a upgrade where you can also answer questions like Audobon Bird Guide for if you saw it in the past and didn’t have a chance to get a picture. And maybe sound ID like Merlin Bird ID. It can also take a while to identify things, and it doesn’t have EVERY species, but I don’t think it’s really possible to know EVERY known species. Otherwise, it’s pretty good, because it does animals, plants, and fungi. So it has a wide variety of species it can identify. It even has a lot of information of each species, and usually MORE pictures, and it shows you related creatures/plants/fungi of identified species. And if you know what animal/plant/fungi it is, you should be able to have a search to be easier like Audobon Bird Guide. Also, a recommendation for people who have this app, is to change in settings so it automatically takes a picture when it gets to species.

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

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

This app is the best gift I got in many years. I have learned the names of all that’s around me, and there is so much more richness than I ever realized. I also love being able to read more about each plant or animal, and teach my daughter and grandsons all that we get to see, in backyards, on city streets, parks, woods. This app tells me, so quickly, and with great accuracy. It does it scientifically, so I also know the order, family, genus. And the pictures are recorded so I don’t lose the learning. I am using this to make a collection with my grandsons. To make games, etc. It makes outdoor time even more fun, and we see and notice the richness and plethora of what we have, even on a city street. I used to have to take guidebooks and slow down to look up each one. In just five minutes in a less used part of my backyard I’ve identified 8 plants I wasn’t quite sure of, or learned new. Get this app! Teach your children. Their eyes and love for their rich world will never be the same. It’s like being in a room where you know no one, or being in a room where you know every face and name.

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

First off, this is a really fun app. It’s great to use with children, with friends, or on your own when out and about in nature. There is all sorts of challenges that you can try out to find all the necessary organisms to get badges and achievements.

The problems come into play when identifying or trying to identify an organism. The camera associated with the app isn’t very responsive at times. Better to use your phones own camera and then upload the photos for identification, if it will identify the items from the photo you took.
The species identification also becomes a problem. Sometimes it takes the camera a good while to identify a species or when trying to focus on just one organism surrounded by others.
Also, identification can be a bit off at times saying that an organism is something that it is not. Most of the time it’s something similar or in the same family, but many times it will come up and give the wrong species or names. (Example: an ibis was identified as a spoonbill.)

This is still a fun app and doing the challenges is exciting. I still recommend it but the issues are pretty bothersome.

Used to be amazing, but y’all have not kept up with the app. The software is absolutely diabolical. You can expect the app to shut down, or freeze your phone, every time you use it. The identifications have become severely unreliable, and that is partly the fault of iNaturalist not curating citizen identifications properly. Almost every plants photo gallery on iNat with be 25% completely wrong. That creates an algorithm that cannot be trusted.

Seek can no longer identify the most common and simple wildlife, the same wildlife it was once able to accurately iD. Additionally, it does NOT work offline. At all. It will, however, drain your battery of all life.

Fix this app. You have way too many people using iNat & Seek to be so lazy about your updates & software.

My friend and I tested Seen with Picture This, because I was sure Seek was superior. Picture This was able to identify a bottlebrush (super common landscape plant in Texas) within 15 seconds. I sat with my phone out, capturing the plant at all different ridiculous angles, for at least 3 minutes. It couldn’t identify even the genus of this plant. That is absolutely pathetic.

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

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

Look, the concept is amazing. This kind of thing has been long overdue on such a scale among apps that works at all.

The problem is…

Flies, fly.
Birds fly.
Frogs jump.
Spiders skitter away. Some at lightning speed. They all hide as well.

Nothing stands still and let’s you get a good angle. Heck, sometimes I knew what it was but the app didn’t. It’s also very difficult for the camera to focus, but that might just be my phone.

I took a very good picture of a frog… they couldn’t find out what it was. Thought a striped fly was a tree crab and was standing there an hour. Got an amazingly clear photo of a spider, still only figuring out that it indeed was a spider. Some of my most amazing pictures can’t be deciphered because I am taller than eye level of the animal. I have to stand directly parallel, which could be dangerous. And I have to stand there trying to get a good angle, at least for 15 minutes, and that’s if your lucky. Most times you can’t get the actual species by picture which is a real bummer.

A robin is not a groundhog.
So please work on that, ok? It would be amazing if I didn’t have to be in an exact position to figure out what animal is in front of me. Other than that, amazing. It’s a huge leap from what we used to do.

It’s pretty awesome being able to ID organisms by just holding them in the frame of a camera!

Moving critters are tricky to get. But it’s still rewarding to “collect” as many images from all the branches of the tree of life as you can.

I have only 2 complaints:

1. The relationship between this app and iNaturalist needs more explanation. Yes, I know Seek “gets its data” from iNaturalist. But although I logged into my iNaturalist account in Seek, it’s not at all obvious if, how, or when my observations are shared with the greater iNaturalist online community.
2. Photos taken in Seek do not have any camera metadata attached to them! Seek makes it optional whether to include observations in the Photos app. I like to. But there is no way for me to filter observations taken on my older iPhone vs. my new iPhone, because there is no metadata on the phone/camera model on Seek photos. (If any devs are reading this, please add this feature! BONUS POINTS: Allow me to designate an album in Photos for my Seek observations.)

Despite these things, this is a pretty phenomenal app. If you have any interest in the natural world, this is a fantastic example of how technology can support curiosity and exploration, and allow personally-driven learning.

This app is amazing (when it works). It usually correctly identifies most things down to the species so long as it’s a perfectly clear photo, the entire organism is in the shot, and you have the perfect angle. With larger animals like horses or sheep it doesn’t need to be quite as exact to identify it, but when you are trying to figure out what species some small creature is, you’re usually out of luck. This is because it gets harder to fit the above requirements the smaller the thing you’re trying to take a picture of is, and since the creatures are wild, they usually run off while seek loads. I’ve found that for flighty stuff, it’s better to just take tons of pictures with the normal camera and hope one works for seek later. Seek will also only identify the creature if it’s in a normal position, a rabbit that’s tucked low to the ground can’t be identified beyond mammal, and sometimes if a spider raises its legs defensively during the shot, it will identify as an insect instead. If you could decrease the loading time for seek to open, and for it to identify creatures from more varied angles it would work much better. It’s a lot harder to code this stuff in than it seems so thanks for all the great stuff you guys have already added and fixed.

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

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.

So I just downloaded this app because I love plants and bugs to death and they’re the most delicate and perfect things on this planet, and I was hoping I would be able to identify a spider I found it my house that looks like either a brown recluse or a wolf spider (can’t figure out which, either way though I love that little dude). Before I posted the spider I was going to post a picture of a honeybee but decided on a weird winged insect I found in Quincy Center instead. Right off the bat, while I was choosing my photo from my phone, the app didn’t have an option to choose one of my other albums on my phone so I had to scroll for a good 7+ minutes to even find the picture I wanted since it was taken in July and I have ~20,000 images and videos on my phone. When I finally found it, the picture wasn’t cLeAr EnOuGh, so it didn’t recognize it and I ended up having to post it to the community for someone else to figure out. When choosing the date the photo was taken, it was extremely frustrating as there aren’t separate columns for the month, day, and year. You have to scroll all the way down to the month you took the photo and then find the day, and sometimes it glitches out and gets the year wrong so you have to do it again. In theory, this could be a nice app. But there are too many issues and it’s just not as easy to use as it really should be. And on top of that, it didn’t even post correctly and an error occurred. In my opinion, just stick to looking up the bugs, plants, and animals on google.

Update: I took a photo of my shih tzu and it thought he was a guinea pig so now I have a guinea pig registered even though I don’t have one. I tried again and it thought he was a tamarin.

This app is a fantastic idea, “gamifying” the observation of local organisms and making it easier for both casual wildlife fans and researchers to gain data. However, it is lacking in some serious ways that bring down its overall quality. Here’s its biggest flaws...

1. Needs more iNaturalist integration!

The app gets its data and (optionally) uploads sightings to iNaturalist, but that’s where the communication between the two apps ends. As of now, a casual user has no motivation to upload a partial identification to iNaturalist, because a successful identification doesn’t get updated in your Seek stats. I have uploaded many freshwater reptiles and amphibians that Seek didn’t recognize, and were identified by other users. This still didn’t count towards my amphibian and reptile badges, of course. I still upload to iNaturalist because I care about helping the survey of my environment, but not everyone is as motivated without the promise of visual progress. This should really be on the next Seek update if this app expects to maintain long term users that want to upload harder to identify organisms.

2. Terrible photo selection
There’s no way to browse albums when choosing an existing photo, so if you have a photo of a creature from 4 months ago, you’ll have to scroll forever to find it.

3. No location filters
I understand introduced or invasive species exist, but currently Seek is WAY too trigger happy with suggesting species that live on the opposite coast from me. There should be a filter to prevent “Texas tortoises” from showing up in North Carolina.

4. Can’t narrow down species ID
When my image is hovering around “Grass Spiders” at the genus level, why not let me browse through the most common species and see if I can pick the best match? Experts on iNaturalist already have to double check submissions before they can be considered research level.

I’ve always been interested in stuff like biology and its related topics. Zoology, taxonomy, etc. So naturally when I came across this app I was thrilled and it was an instant download. It does sometimes take a while to identify the species, but I understand that usually happens when there are a lot of similar-looking species, so I won’t fault the app for that.

I have a few real complaints though.

One, it’s more difficult than it should be to identify animals because of the app’s startup time. The animal might run/fly away in the time it takes for the app to start up, and then for the animal to be identified. I feel it could be made shorter, and another solution I can think of is there can be a setting to default to the camera upon startup.

Two, the camera function is way too basic for what the task requires. Why is the camera flash disabled? It makes it impossible to use at night or in corners of your house unless you have a flashlight or something, and to both use a flashlight and hold the phone is difficult. Even worse, many organisms are tiny. Especially things like insects. So there should be focus controls on the camera. Have a focus lock option, or something. Getting tiny insects is infuriating because the camera keeps defocusing when you try to get a close, detailed photo. So you need to do it instead at a bit of a distance and zoom in, but this makes the tiny insect look fuzzy and impossible for the app to recognize the exact species of. This is a huge problem. Please fix this. I’ve been trying to identify a carpet beetle species in my house for so long but it won’t go further than genus because I can’t take a clear pic.

Three, the observations list becomes a mess when it gets long. The categories should be all collapsed by default.

Other than those things, it’s great. Having lived in the area I live in for pretty much my while life, it’s cool finding out the exact names for the plants and animals (and fungi) I’ve always seen around.

I love the idea of being able to identify plants and animals, and to keep a record of what I’ve seen and where I’ve seen it. This app will record only some of that. It is interesting technology the way the software can identify various species from your photos, and I recognize the challenges in making it perfect. Having said that, I wish it were better in the following ways:

- It doesn’t say where you are when you identified the species, even though the app knows where you are. It just gives you the date in your tagging records, which is helpful, but it would be better if it also said the place. For example, on my home page, it says, “Here is what you are likely to see in Hawaii,” but then when I tag an Indian grey mongoose it says, “Location unknown.”

- Although the app recognizes some photos, it doesn’t recognize other perfectly clear photos with no extraneous stuff in them. I’m happy to send examples of this, if someone from the app wants to contact me.

- The corollary is that some photos have to be so perfect as to be unlikely to be able to be obtained. Fast animals, distant birds, and other creatures that won’t sit still cannot be captured well enough for the app. I have resorted to pulling photos down off the internet for things I have found but for which I cannot obtain a sufficient image for the app’s purposes, and then tagging those. (Note: I only do this if I have already taken a photograph that the app has rejected as being of insufficient quality. Again, happy to send examples.)

- You do not have the option of confirming that something has been accurately identified. For example, the app might say, “This looks like a red-headed cardinal, but we’re not sure.” You do not have the option of looking at their sample photo and saying, “Yup. That’s the bird I saw,” or “Nope. That’s not the bird I saw.”

- The app may say, “We think that is a herpestes, but we’re not sure what species,” and you don’t have the option of recording it at the broader level of identification.

- You do not have the option of adding things either that cannot be identified by the app (trees, apparently, for example), and identifying them yourself, which would help add to the Seek database.

- It would be a fun thing, if possible, after you have tried but failed to identify something yourself, to have the option of uploading things for future identification by someone who knows what they’re doing. (“What is this species of spider?” “Have you ever seen a ginger flower that looks like this one?”)

The idea of this app is great, but this one needs more work before it’s ready for prime time.

I love this app very much. When I see any species that I haven’t recorded, I immediately swipe my iPhone from my pocket and open the Seek app. I love it how this app uses iNaturalist to feed the database. Clever! This way, they use multiple minds all over the world instead of just minds of the team who created Seek.

There are some feedbacks I have for this app.

- Have monthly challenges available by first of the month. I was really looking forward to do July challenge but I was disappointed it hasn’t came up as if right now. If monthly challenges put too much pressure on Seek’s team, then create quarterly challenges with difficult tasks. Something like that. At least have new challenges ready when people expects it.

- (Idea) have marathon badges that are not related to challenges. For example, have a badge for observing species in at least 25 US states. Or have a badge for observing species in three (or so) continents. That definitely will take most people long time to complete.

- Have the option to open or collapse each category that I have observed. As I come closer to 300 species observed, it became difficult to scroll down and find species in that list because there are so much to scroll past.

- For the same reason above, each category (i.e. plants, birds, reptiles, etc) need their own subcategories. Just at least few subcategories. It becomes increasingly difficult to search for specific species I’ve observed in a category that holds over 100-200 species.

- Add more level-based badges. I’ve maxed out at “Adventurer” LONG TIME AGO and it was too easy to achieve for people who are like me.

- (Idea) It will be AWESOME if I had a map that I can access and see dots of all species I’ve observed altogether.

- Enable camera lights. When someone chooses to turn the camera light, make sure it does not flash. Only have it turned on like it would when you wanted lights for video on iPhone, it’ll turn on and stay on until you are done. Flashing may spook some species. This will help a lot during nights where artificial lights are not sufficient. I’ve tried using my iPhone’s camera first then uploading it to Seek app but it has proved to be difficult because I was not able to move my phone around until the app tells me the exact species. With regular camera, I have to go back and forth between camera and Seek to get a species name.

- (Idea but not that important to me) Have an option to add friends on the app that will give us the ability to see what they’ve observed. I’d also like to see their maps of all species they’ve observed if it is available. I do not want to see any badge for “the most friends” if this feature is available. It’ll miss the whole point of this app.

- Make sure to give us the ability to choose “captive” or “wild” when we take pictures, not just when we post it on iNaturalist. Preferably after we’ve taken a picture and during the species recognition section. I know you asked us to not take pics of species in zoos, gardens, or homes but that will not stop people from doing it. It’ll mess up your database and require more brainpower from your team to clean it up.

- Give us the ability to delete a species recognition right after we have taken a picture (not from the species list) because sometimes the app misidentifies a species and I have no choice but leave it in my account.

That’s all of the feedbacks I have for this wonderful app. I am really looking forward to see it improve and teach me more. 10/10 recommended for anyone.

We just got new phones this week (7-24-23) and although the Seek app transferred to the new phone, my hundreds of observations did not. We have been unable to get help using the support e-mail for iNaturalist. There is no link on the app for 'export to file' etc. I need instructions on how to get my Seek observations transferred from my old phone to my new phone.

They now ur location don’t danload it not safe

With the new update you cannot zoom in on the animals you are trying to identify in the photo. This was a feature in the previous version and very useful

Let me save you the trouble. Absolutely every plant is just a “dicot.” Tried it for weeks, updated to get rid of bugs several times, made sure the pictures were clear, and it still can’t figure out what anything is.

worked really well fir a couple of days but now on opening it just flashes for about 30 seconds then once you oress the cameta icon all it can identify is generic "dicots"
Was great, now useless. Ios13.4,iPhone 6s
I'll give a better rating once you fix the bugs...

The app worked fairly well before the update, but since the update, there are a LOT of bugs, lost submissions/photos, and poor camera settings. For accurate submissions you need to be able to focus/zoom, and the app doesn’t allow the camera to do that. Such a disappointing update. ☹️

I’ve tried about four times to set a new password and seek app seems to refuse to send that information to my email. They keep telling me they’ve sent me the information to my email but they don’t actually send it,and yes I have checked junk mail-so now I’m going to look for a new app

When I first got this it was so amazing the app worked perfectly and I used it to identify garden weeds which was super fun. I recently downloaded it again and now within seconds of opening the app it crashes. I have downloaded like three times and the same thing keeps happening. Pretty hard to use an app that doesn’t work properly.

I’ve used this app for a long time and have enjoyed the ease of use and ability to identify plants along a local trail. Unfortunately for the past couple of weeks the app is no longer accessing my photos - blank screen. This renders the app mostly unusable to me as o prefer the camera options for photos in other apps. Please fix this soon, spring is almost over!

Is it really true that there is no rotation on my iPad?

Whenever I allowed it to look at my photos it immediately started populating (seemingly randomly) from the photos on my phone. This would indicate to me that you have the ability to download any or all of my photos. Is that correct? Is there another way for me to pick a photo or group of photos and hand them off to your app?

I literally just downloaded this app and made an account, excited to get to know my environment a little more.

When I tried to click on a species, the app crashed on me. I tried again and the same thing happened. Then, I tried to click on a different species and again, it crashed. I even closed the app, gave it a few minutes and tried again but to no avail.

I wouldn’t recommend this app since it appears to not even work. I’m just going to delete it.

I feel like this app was better BEFORE the “fancy” interface update. Features like zoom, the Wikipedia link, and immediately sorting it into your recording log seem to have disappeared. It’s exciting on trips to take photos (great ones, close up, zoomed in) when there’s no service, and disappointing when you’re down at the bottom of the hill and Seek can’t tell the specie identity. I once took a pic of the dog, and seek knew he was a canine. Now, I’m not so confident.

I was so excited when I found this app! I have been exploring botany during quarantine and wanted to use Seek to help me expand my knowledge of local flora in a community-driven gamelike way, but I haven’t been able to get a single successful identification saved.
Every time I open the camera or take a photo, the app force quits me back out to my phone’s home screen and loses the photo and the identification.
Unfortunately in this state it’s basically unusable for me which makes me sad.

I applaud the idea behind this app. However, it clearly needs work. Animals and objects need to be centered, and still there’s a huge possibility, it won’t be identified. The database appears limited. Most frustrating, though, is the inability to choose albums other than the Camera Roll from which to choose. Additionally, once a species is identified and you try to add another, here you go back to the beginning of the camera roll and have to scroll through, in my case, a huge number of photos to get back to where you left off.
Seek and you likely ‘won’t find’.

This app used to be surprisingly great. It wasn't perfect, but if you had reasonable expectations and confirmed its IDs with a second source, it was definitely super useful.

Unfortunately, the recent major update has basically broken it. It no longer seems to be able to ID anything to species at all, and when it makes a guess at a higher taxonomic level it uses the common name instead of the scientific which is actually kind of misleading—it will call an apple a rose, or a broccoli a mustard, for instance.

Also, it's no longer possible to crop images in the app in order to highlight the organism being identified. This was a very useful feature and I don't understand why it was removed.

The app was great before but now it's useless. Why? So disappointing.

So now I’m almost on top of a swan...tells you it’s a swan but won’t Add because it can’t identify which kind. Also identified a hippo as a west Indian manatee..seriously?
Third comment...still not impressed with new updates, 10 feet away from bright red cardinal & still doesn’t recognize, keep workin on it guys. Neat little app, if you can get it to recognize things, in a lot of cases you have to be almost on top of the animal for it to be recognized...don’t think I’m going to do that with some of the things here in Florida
Second rating, needs a little work is an understatement, terrible identification of animals, tells u to zoom in & when you do still cannot identify, then tells you to take another photo & get closer, obviously they’ve never been chased by an angry goose, and never mind that it’s too late, deleting.

I just downloaded this app a few minutes ago and I can’t make it work. It asked me if I wanted it to use my location. I said no. I don’t understand why the app needs to know where I am. Then, when I tried to use the app, it said I can’t use it unless I let it know my location. Why does the app give you the option to say you don’t want it to use your location if that isn’t really an option? I really wanted to use the app,so I decided that I would let it know my location. It said I could configure that in settings. I went to settings and there was no option for turning the location on! There are only three options in the settings: Select language,Seek camera, and species detail. So my advice to anyone downloading this app is to make sure you say yes to allowing the app to know where you are. If you don’t, apparently you won’t have the opportunity later to turn location detection on. I am deleting the app now.