Recently, I noticed that there’s an option to identify items using Google Lens. I’m using the Chrome browser — all you have to do is right-click the image and select “Search image with Google Lens.” I was wondering if anyone else uses this feature. Is it useful, especially in situations where iNatur…

Personally I’ve never found Google lens to be helpful in identification – it’s much less specialized than iNat’s own AI, for instance it doesn’t know anything about location. However I do find it useful for searching up a photo that I’m suspicious of being a copyright violation.

Sometimes if iNat CV suggests only one taxon for my own photo but I’m skeptical (e.g. its some sort of invert I know the CV struggles with/might have a lot of species below the CV threshold) I’ll do a google lens search to look for other things it could plausibly be (along with more traditional meth…

I second jfmantis, only ever really useful for potentially copyright violating items and LLMs are really not reliable aside from extremely common and or conspicuous species, plus the cv is pretty decent along with the similar species tab.

Copyright infringement = yes. Cultivated plants (which are not the focus of iNat) so Google Lens is a better way to pick up cultivars and assorted horticultural horrors. CV has no idea but it might be … then Google Lens sometimes knows exactly what it is, or at least gives me a possible direction …

I use it from time to time. One advantage is the ability to specify which part of the photo you are interested in. When there is a lot of extraneous stuff in the image, the iNat CV will give a lot of weird suggestions, whereas with Lens you can say that it is just this small part of the image that I…

[image] Vireya: One advantage is the ability to specify which part of the photo you are interested in. That could be a good enhancement for iNat computer vision—to allow an identifier to select a cropped area of an image and have the computer vision engine return suggestions based on those pi…

I use TinEye instead of Google Lens for copyright infringement, however I don’t use TinEye for identifying.

This is a great idea, I have wished I’d be able to do this to help with ID

When the CV completly fails because the invertebrate is too obscure, I will often search my image (On the upload page) in google lens. The google lens always gives an incorrect “It is X species” but then scrolling down, there have now been a handful of times where one of the image results is of a cl…

Identifying with Google Lens

Nature Talk

vbjanos November 7, 2025, 10:41am 11

Google lens is great identifying landmarks from TV shows.

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Identifying with Google Lens

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