Same issue, same phone, for a couple of weeks now.
2 Likes
iPhone 16 pro
iOS 18.6.2
Seek version 2.17.4 (400)
Last week I tried to take a photo while identifying a species and the camera seemed to freeze. I then got a black screen with the “sorry we weren’t able to capture your photo” message. I tried closing the app, same error. I tried restarting my phone. Same error. I had no cell service. When I got home I updated the app and was able to once again take photos in Seek but then the problem started again. I looked to see if there was another Seek update but there was not. This is so frustrating.
I have the same problem with the error “Sorry we weren’t able to load the camera” when clicking on the ‘take-photo’ button (the video scanning before that is fine).
What I can add to the diagnostics is that it seems to only happen when I am so close that it is using the macro (wideangle) lens. It works fine when I’m farther away.
It was also OK with my iPhone 14 pro IOS 18.7.
The problem started with my iPhone 17 pro IOS 26.
2 Likes
Platform: Seek
App version number, if a mobile app issue: 3.3.9
Browser, if a website issue:
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
Screenshots of what you are seeing:
Description of problem:
Step 1: get to species level when making an observation
Step 2: take photo
Step 3: get “sorry, we weren’t able to capture your photo [capture/unknown]: Error Domain=AVFoundationErrorDomain Code=-11800
Moved the above bug report to this one to keep them all in the same place.
I have had this issue for some time. Though with the iPhone 17 pro. It’s unclear to me what causes it. No specific behavior pattern or workflow causes it.
Except perhaps that it occurs when I’m most excited to log a new to me life form.
Platform: iOS 26.1
App version number: 2.17.7
Browser, if a website issue:
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
Screenshots of what you are seeing:
Description of problem:
Anytime I try to identify a new species, this screen pops up. It has been doing this for months, so I decided to try deleting and reinstalling the app hoping it would fix the problem. I lost over a thousand identifications and it is still doing the same thing.
Step 3:
Any fixes to this problem? It happens over half the time I use the app. Have been unable to log observations for days.
We just started rolling out an update (version 2.17.8 (410)) that should fix this. Right now it’s at 10% release and will be expanding every day.
The fix, unfortunately, is to disable the widest angle lens, which is what looks to have caused the problem. So that does mean that macro mode for recent iPhone “Pro” models won’t work in Seek. Once we make sure this update fixes the main issue of photos/observations not being saved, we’ll work on making macro mode work again, but we wanted to make sure the main issue was fixed. If you need to use macro mode, you can use your iPhone’s default camera app and import the photo into Seek.
If anyone sees that they’re now using 2.17.8 (410), let us know if that has fixed the problem.