I’ve used Seek in tandem with iNat’s iOS app for the better part of 3 years now. Seek’s CV is pretty whack in the sense that it’s unable to identify anything that wasn’t observed on iNat before 2012 (or is it 2013?). For reasons unknown photos taken through the app are rid of their metadata and their resolution is laughable once transferred to iNat, so I never publish observations directly from Seek. On the positive side, I really enjoy Seek’s gamified functionalities (achievements and challenges) and its colourful interface.
I think Seek provides much more accurate IDs than similar apps such as PictureThis, which I would expect to be more reliable because of their narrower focus. However, iNat is in every way preferrable to Seek for seasoned naturalists looking to interact with like-minded individuals and improve their identification skills.
Does anyone who use SEEK know if people see notes on their observations? There is a new SEEK user in the area I ID in that has racked up 400+ observations in the last like, two weeks, because there’s like 5 photos of the same thing (each with vastly different ID’s sometimes!) and I keep leaving onboarding notes and welcome notes and ID tips and trying to link images together for them so they can merge them…and they aren’t doing any of it. I suspect is limit of SEEK and they are never seeing my notes? I just sent a message to see if maybe that will pop up. It’s frustrating as an ID’er to sort through this continually and makes me wonder why the designers even chose to allow linking SEEK to your iNaturalist account?
Seek’s connection to iNat is basically one-way; you can post an observation but nothing from that observation is sent back to Seek. They should have been automatically signed up for daily update emails but maybe they don’t read them or maybe they entered the wrong email address when making their iNat account. Or maybe they just unsubscribed.
Sort of as as way to help people interested in sharing their observations do so but on a limited basis (you can only post an observation when it’s new). I’ve come around to think it should be totally self-contained, to keep things simple, but a fair number of observations are made with it, so it’s not a clear-cut decision.