Seek auto-pictures and data quality

General
#1

I just began using iNaturalist and Seek on my iPhone a week ago.

I started with Seek first, just because that was the first thing I saw in the iPhone app store.

I find that as a natural habit, when I log identifications using iNaturalist, I am careful and selective and insist on getting a respectable picture on my phone first.

When I use Seek, though, I reply and the automatic species picture. I upload it and move on, and sometimes clean up my records later when I get home.

I was wondering if dedicated iNaturalist users had noticed a drop in accuracy from the community in general since Seek became available with this feature.

Have you noticed more frequent blurry uploads or misidentifications from other users, or possibly an improvement in quantity and participation?

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#2

My guess is that most of iNat and Seek users are different people as apps and website have different purposes and if you use iNat what’s the point of using Seek? I haven’t noticed any drop but locally Seek is far less known. 90% of blurry and misided obs are from new users, hard to say how many of them have used Seek before.

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#3

I use both apps. I use Seek to get an idea, in real-time, of what the ID of something is. The INat app is quite cumbersome for accomplishing this. I wish that the INat app had the real-time “AR” view that Seek provides. The Seek app is difficult to use to create quality observations however. The lack of ability to add multiple photos is a non-starter for most observations.

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#4

In case you’re interested, here are all observations posted to iNat from Seek.

Seek was never designed as a primary avenue for posting observations to iNat, and it’s not easy to submit a lot of observations with it (although some folks have posted far more than I thought would be enjoyable to do…) It was designed fro people who want to engage with nature but can’t/don’t want to use iNaturalist, and I think in that realm it’s pretty pretty successful - at least judging from social media posts. Sure, some inaccurate observations are posted via Seek, but I think the number posted via iNat is significantly higher, probably because it’s just easier to post to iNat from the standard app.

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#5

I use SEEK and Upload via it. I use both apps and only rarely the website…
I have uploaded some observations directly, too.

But for me, via SEEK is my way. :)

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