Is there a way to 'link' iNaturalist & Seek (and if not, should there be?). Let's discuss/compare the iNat team Apps

I downloaded Seek on my phone to show a friend, who is interested in nature but not in social interaction/the ‘community’ side of iNaturalist, and I noticed Seek does a lot of neat things that iNat doesn’t. Personally, I’m an absolute achievement Junkie and love the idea of species badges, challenges badges and so on. I would love to link up my iNaturalist observations to be used for those, and I absolutely love the community challenges present in Seek. I know challenges are also in iNaturalist, but they are more hidden away. I’d love to complete challenges, earn seek badges and do all that stuff in tandem, without having to upload the same observations to multiple apps.

It also seems to me that the Seek app has a much nicer UI, and runs much much better than the iNaturalist app. I guess this might be because It looks like Seek had some heavy sponsoring from Netflix, even? Hopefully the team can bring the same level of smoothness and quality to iNat!

So I guess my major question is, can the apps be linked so I can participate in seek-style badges and challenges with my iNat observations? If not, would and should this be a future possibility?

Second, for people who use both, how do you find they compare? When do you open one app or the other?

1 Like

well, Seek specifically does not connect with iNaturalist because one of it’s main uses is to be used by younger kids who shouldn’t be able to us inaturalist or even legally can’t (there’s a security risk to kids adding location and photo data without close adult supervision). So for that reason, I don’t think they will ever link Seek directly. However, i think it would be neat to add certain elements of Seek to the iNaturalist app, such as the augmented reality species ID. I can also see the appeal of the more polished ui and the badges and such.

The Seek challenges don’t seem to do anything yet? I looked at them yesterday and they seemed to just track how many species you can find, same as the main app.

I use Seek if i want to use the algorithm without cell service, or if i am showing it to kids, or if i want some quick ID thoughts on a plant where i’m not using iNat. I use iNat pretty much all the rest of the time, because i want to record the data.

Does Seek use the same ID algorithms as iNat?

Yes, except seek has a higher threshold set for certainty before it will offer an id - it doesn’t offer the top 10 or “maybe” thing.

I would LOVE the badges to be on iNaturalist as well. I’d also love to see some monthly or even weekly challenges. I like the Missions option available on the Android version that I use but I wish using it was a little more polished. It would be a lot more fun if there was some kind of challenge to find 5 suggested taxa from the missions or something like that.

4 Likes

seems like Seek and iNaturalist are connected (sort of) now? https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/seek-new-functionality-lets-users-post-to-inaturalist/3764

2 Likes

A post was split to a new topic: Sharing iNaturalist observations to Seek?