Love photographing plants and animals in the great outdoors? Seek is a new app you may want to download if you use an iPhone. It’s like a Shazam for nature: the app can help identify the things you photograph using the power of image recognition.



The app was created by iNaturalist, an online social network for nature enthusiasts, and its stated goal is to help everyone explore the nature around them.

If you ever take a picture and aren’t sure of what exactly you just captured, pull out the Seek app and point the Seek Camera at the living thing. Seek will use AI to examine the photo and attempt to match it to one of the roughly 30,000 species it currently recognizes. And as photographers upload more photos, the system will only get better at recognizing more and more things.

Once a plant or animal is recognized, Seek will add it to your personal collection, award you badges, and share information about it from Wikipedia.

“Drawing from millions of wildlife observations on iNaturalist, Seek shows you lists of commonly recorded insects, birds, plants, amphibians, and more in your area,” Seek’s description states. “Scan the environment with the Seek Camera to identify organisms using the tree of life.”

The app doesn’t require any registration to use and doesn’t collect any user data by default, though location data is used to show you the plants and animals in your area.

Seek is a free app available through Apple’s App Store.

(via Seek via My Modern Met)

Image credits: Header illustration photos by Pexels, Free-Photos, and Pexels.