Ever since the first version of Seek was released in March 2018, people have been asking if their observations will contribute to citizen science or be used to improve the computer vision model. Now, they can!
As of today, Seek users can post to iNaturalist. To make this happen, in Seek you can:
Create an iNaturalist account or log in with an existing iNaturalist account
Create an account for a child under the age of 13 (with a parent or guardian’s permission)
Optionally post to iNaturalist at the time of making an observation. This is a simple, one-way method to get it to iNaturalist, with limited functionality.
Too sad that Seek works only with places with sufficient number of observations, otherwise it’s a great tool. I view it as a challenge to get places i’m around to that level
I saved my image (I took several, but only the last one appears to be transferred to iNaturalist - confusing as it asked me to take another which I did), but these
saved as duplicates: ~ one without a picture and ~ one with a picture (both with date and locality), but the picture version did not save the “planted” option.
the locality was out by over 50m and was not what was shown on the pin before I posted it to iNaturalist (which transfers it from my garden into a local restaurant), without a geo accuracy value (Not recorded).
(Using iPhone, I will delete the photoless observations on the 5th June.)
< edit: another loaded normally - i.e. only one download. I think the duplicates may have happened because I left the app to other windows - so it does not download in the background when other apps are used?
However, the automatic ID by Seek, got credited as my identification on iNaturalist: I have no idea if the species ID is remotely correct. >
I found these apps today and I’m LOVING them! I love how easy Seek is to use and how accurate it’s been. My whole days has been going around my yard and through old photos to ID things I didn’t know. So thanks!
My request would be this:
If Seek ID’s something, it only seems to be in the Seek app and not my iNat account. If Seek doesn’t ID it I can upload it but then I get things ID’s over on iNat and now I’ve got two running lists.
I would love to be able to push all my ID’d items on Seek over to iNat as well. I don’t want to go through the trouble of uploading them twice. A “send to iNat” option would be awesome (individually or via a “select” button where I could do a bunch at once).
I don’t know if this is the right place for this but here goes. I love the app so far.
Requested features:
The ability to flag observations that may be inaccurate.
The ability to make IDs more general. Ex. From eastern hemlock to just hemlock.
An option to post observations to iNaturalist after identification. Ex. After a hike, I would like to upload all observations and pictures when connected to WiFi.
The option to remove sightings from life list that may have been inaccurate.
those are all core features of the iNaturalist app itself, so I am guessing if you want something to that depth you are better off just using that. Except the last one, that one seems like it would apply to just Seek.
I use seek for the real-time identification which iNaturalist doesn’t have.
The ability to flag questionable identifications would help Seek make less mistakes in the future.
As I said, I post all my findings to iNaturalist. Sometimes I don’t get the best coverage. I try to post observations but it takes 3-4 minutes, meaning I can’t scan anything else during that time. It would be useful if I could post those IDs when I know I’m not going to use seek for a while.
These are just suggestions that would make it seek run smoother in conjunction with iNaturalist, not necessarily necessities.
Always turn off auto sync in the iNat app. Then you can save things to upload later. The seek app doesn’t work to add to iNat out of cell service, and the iNat only works outside of cell service with the auto sync turned off (and even with cell service it is very slow like you noticed). You can do this in settings. Beyond that, my guess is getting that real time ID feature in iNat would be more likely for the devs to do, (and really fun) rather than putting a lot of existing iNat functionality into Seek. But i was surprised they allowed iNat uploading from Seek in the first place, so i may be totally off. I like that Seek is more of a ‘casual’ and gamified and easy experience, and my secret hope is that expanding Seek’s use in that way will remove some of the pressure to make the iNat app super usable to newbies, which itself sometimes is hard to balance (in my opinion anyway) with having it a very powerful tool for established high volume users.
That all being said, if you would like new things added to the iNat app feel free to add feature requests under the feature request heading here (do a quick search to make sure something similar wasn’t already proposed). I am not sure if we are using the feature request tag to request features for Seek also. @tiwane any thoughts or preference on that use for the feature requests? maybe we need a separate Seek category here if it really takes off?
So if we’re seeing observations made with Seek, will the user involved be able to see our comments on them? What if they’ve duplicated observations of the same organism? Is it worth trying to tell them to combine if it was duplicated with the Seek system?
I’m suddenly seeing A LOT of duplicates or half complete observations posted via Seek - not sure what to do with them.
They should by default be getting a daily email update with IDs and comments in it. Whether or not they pay attention to that, we’ll see.
Yes, let’s see how things go before making a new Seek category. I think if you have a feature request for Seek, it’s fine to make one in the Feature Requests category on the forum for now.
I’m not sure what you mean here. Can you please elaborate?
Right now you can only add a species to your collection, but you can send a photo of an organism with a higher level ID to iNat.
We don’t want to make Seek the equivalent of iNat, and this would basically be iNat.
It kind of goes along with the remove sightings option. For example, if you remove a western hemlock observation because it was an incorrect observation, then the removal could help teach seek that its identification was wrong.
Hope this clarifies.
Hello,
How do I log into seek under the same iNaturalist account I already have if I log in with my gmail? I never set up a password and it won’t accept my gmail password. I’d rather not make a new login so that my seek observations will show up in my same inaturalist account.
@machi if you log into your account on iNaturalist.org using Google/Gmail, you should be able in your account settings to create a password for your existing iNaturalist account. That will allow you to log in with your account Seek. You should also still be able to log in on the iNaturalist app or website with Google as well.
So erm, we still don’t have the ability to upload our Observations in SEEK to iNaturalist AFTER we’re back on Wifi? :/
Does anyone know if this is going to happen? It would be brilliant as sometimes in the Field, I’m in an area with a very poor Mobile signal! :o
