On apple ( and I think android and IOS ) there’s an app called Picturethis, it’s free and allows you to take of picture of plants and the app will then ’ tell you what the plant is ’ since its free, and a little sketchy does anyone with more taxation and observation experience have experience with it or is willing to test it out? Thanks, if it is reliable it would be super useful, I’ve used it but am not crazy well versed in detailed taxation and can’t be sure if it’s actually good or just finding some common plants that look similar.
This is a forum for discussing iNaturalist, so I’m not sure you’ll find much insight into a competing app here.
You might have gotten your terminology mixed up. “Taxation” refers to the collection of taxes. You’ll want to use the word “taxonomy” when referring to the classification of organisms.
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Actually, @tiwane, I get this sort of question a lot from people when they are considering iNaturalist. So today I went out and did a little test with the apps I’ve been asked about: iNaturalist, PlantSnap, and PictureThis. PlantSnap has a slick webpage and claims to have identified 225million plants worldwide. It is free to download and allows you to keep an album of your plants which you can share with others (but after 10 free snaps, you have to watch an ad to earn more snaps). PictureThis also lets you keep an album, says it has 30million users (apparently worldwide) and can identify 10K plants “including mushrooms.” It costs $30 a year but has a free 1-week trial. So… I went out and tested all 3 apps on 10 plants (herbs, shrubs, trees, a fern, vines) growing wild in South Mississippi. RESULT: iNaturalist ID’d all 10 correctly (first choice on Computer Vision). PlantSnap ID’d just 2 correctly and the guesses were completely wild. PictureThis got 8 correct plus the other 2 to the correct genus. So from that little test, I would forget PlantSnap, acknowledge that PictureThis is worth something (but why pay when iNat is free?). Neither plant app has the iNat community, neither makes your observations public or adds them to a database, and of course they are limited to plants. iNat wins hands down!
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The only app I use for AI identification aside from iNat is PlantNet. Free on Android, absolutely wonderful for plant ID (but only plants!). Does a better job than iNaturalist most of the time, I think primarily because you can do some supervised classification in it, i.e. you identify the flower as a flower, leaf as a leaf, before it offers a suggestion.
Everything else I’ve ever tried is pretty trash though. No sense in paying for inferior stuff!
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