App Store

Seek by iNaturalist

Originator iNaturalist
Primary Metric 30,769
Use the power of image recognition technology to identify the plants and animals all around you. Earn badges for seeing different types of plants, birds, fungi and more! • Get outside and point the Seek Camera at living things • Identify wildlife, plants, and fungi and learn about the organisms all around you • Earn badges for observing different types of species and participating in challenges 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 unless you sign in to your iNaturalist account and submit your observations. Our image recognition technology is based on observations submitted to iNaturalist.org and partner sites, and identified by the iNaturalist community. Seek is part of iNaturalist, a not-for-profit organization. Seek was made by the iNaturalist team with support from the California Academy of Sciences, the National Geographic Society, Our Planet on Netflix, WWF, HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, and Visipedia.
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Developer & User Discourse

Stelladluz • May 15, 2026 ★ 1
Says my dog is a gerbil among many, many wrong IDs. Too many wrong IDs to count. I am surprised this has a 4.8 star rating. Any browser image search gives accuracy.
blobublob • May 14, 2026 ★ 5
ok i love this app but ive deleted it a while ago because theres no way to save ur photos
if u can make like a gallery for the different things that would be rlly awesome
idonthaveanicknameforyoutouse • May 11, 2026 ★ 2
So much is great about this app. It’s user friendly, the id model is remarkable and reliable. I just hate that it is such an invasion of privacy. It requires you to give access to your location, and doesn’t allow you to save any other options such as location or geoprivacy. If you don’t allow location access then it forces you to choose your location on a map EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. It is incredibly tedious and frustrating and done so deliberately so people give in and allow access. Unfortunately when you have to select it, the location starts out in the wrong area and soon people will just hit okay to get through the process faster rather than select an area that encompasses the spot you took the picture at. I hope they fix this, the other plant id apps are catching up.



Taking off a star because of you leave one star the devs can delete it. If you don’t give them access to your location and choose to do it manually they nerf the app and you can no longer get ids.
CreeperKing1615 • May 8, 2026 ★ 5
I love this app so much. It’s free and has cool challenges. Some weekends I will spend hours finding new species. Highly recommended.
Green castle • May 7, 2026 ★ 2
It thought my cat was a guinea pig and that our weeping cherry tree is a Siberian Elm. I can’t figure out how to tell it it’s wrong.
country ! • May 4, 2026 ★ 1
Everything I take a picture of says dicot family. I is not even able to always identify common plants. I would not recommend.
Happy crazy plant lady • May 4, 2026 ★ 5
I suffered for so long trying to ID plants and whole this app cannot always help me find what I am looking for it is by far THE BEST at navigating through the nonsense and really helping me to ID plants and gain superior knowledge so that I can do the best for the plant, myself and the world with the accurate understanding of the plants name, needs, place in the world. Etc. thanks so very much!
heydey80 • May 3, 2026 ★ 3
I’ve had this app a few years now. Initially, it worked. But for the last year, it has not identified any plants successfully. It often identifies a plant as “dicot” and stops there. It may flicker a family, but never settles on anything.
Eec2213 • Apr 28, 2026 ★ 2
I use to love this app. I enjoyed collecting species that are local to me. Lately though the app has sucked. I know what the animas and plants are before I try and add them to my observations. If I take a picture with my phone without the app usually it’s correct. But if I use the seek app while taking a picture it’s always wrong. For some reason it thinks every bird is a cardinal. Even wax wings and finches.
FritzMcDougal • Apr 27, 2026 ★ 5
Have used it for years and learned so much about the natural world.
Ja¡Wølf • Apr 27, 2026 ★ 4
I enjoy the app. I have two critiques:
1. The warning screen that pops up when you try to open the camera is not necessary and this extra step has made me miss many opportunities to identify animals that are gone before you can snap a pic.
2. Sometimes the app is so finicky that no matter how much time one spends and angles and zooms used, there is never any identification.
lyftsux1980a • Apr 27, 2026 ★ 1
I have uploaded over 100 clear photos and the app has yet to identify any of them.
Smarty Review • Apr 22, 2026 ★ 4
Recognition errors. Can't create account to sync finds across devices without agreeing to: " I consent to allow my personal information to be transferred to the United States of America"
The Real Denster • Apr 19, 2026 ★ 1
They stopped updating the app in 2024. They say there’s “minor bug fixes” in the logs, but the app and all its features are exactly the same as when I joined in 2024. Even the newest available challenge dates to December 2024. And it is missing a lot of species. Believe me, I know the these things. Not only do I use Seek daily but I am also a scientist with a phd in biology
leppuo • Apr 18, 2026 ★ 4
i would rate 5 stars but since 2024 seek seems to not get as much attention from the devs with no new challenges in 2 years. Also the camera is quite frustrating when trying to focus in on an insect
Mr. Insect • Apr 15, 2026 ★ 5
Very good. Cool ui, gamified a bit, got me into bugs and reminds me of pokemon go in real life a bit
dane_lp • Apr 14, 2026 ★ 1
I used to love this app. It was a great way for me to explore the world around me and learn about the natural environment. But lately it either doesn’t recognize species, or the app freezes and has to be restarted.
plantkid378 • Apr 14, 2026 ★ 5
I have had this app for a few years now and it is AMAZING, This app is free, almost never wrong, and is just awesome, I do have a few recommendations, First off, there should be a label telling you wether the plant is toxic or not, Second, I feel that there should be a little more info about the species, And lastly, maybe a few super hard badges to get. Other than that I would HIGHLY recommend this app to anyone who wants to become a botanist one day!
DanManSand • Apr 9, 2026 ★ 1
This app does a lot of cool stuff! There are two reasons I don’t use it:
- The initial safety “Remember screen” is not safe at all and a poor design choice. At least provide a setting to turn it off! I appreciate the warning and fully agree it should be there a few times, but not as a persistent message. This has the unintended effect of drawing a person’s awareness away from nature and into the app, ironically leading to them becoming less aware of their surroundings. App deloading can make this an even more frustrating experience especially when low power mode leads to that occurring more, compounded with this being more common for people going on long hikes, and even further since people that are into long hikes could also be more into Seeking things as they go along which drains battery further and thus low power mode.
- It should give a link to the species after identification to quickly get to more details about the capture. This could be a direct link to Wikipedia or a prebuilt Google search link, anything to just get the species name easier into a place it can be searched for.
- On the species page, why can you not view other photos of the plant fullscreen?!
ChrissyJuice • Apr 5, 2026 ★ 1
Apparently every plant is a dicot, I never knew