Experimenting with the "Seek" app on my iPhone
I've been trying the Seek App on my iPhone for about a week. It's pretty decent at identifying many species in a diverse group of organisms. Can be really bad with butterflies and dragonflies, but otherwise comes close to spot on for most species. Several glaring blunders - it apparently defaults to Canadian tiger swallowtail for any yellow swallowtails in Michigan, even when way out of range. Similarly tanked on a Red-spotted purple, calling it a Pipevine Swallowtail (not know from where the photo was taken).
Also a strange issue was with an Ashy clubtail - three consecutive photos resulted in three species. With a little effort I knew that it was Ashy. So, I'd be careful using it with unkown dragonflies and directly posting.
Another strange thing happened with a tiger moth that it assigned to Spilosoma lubricipeda, a Eurasian species not found near Lake Superior in Michigan. Otherwise it's been spot on for most moths, which is quite surprising, especially for the micros that were identified to species, although many were id'd to genus.
Most plants were id'd properly, even without a flower. So, that can be helpful. So ids even surprised me, which is OK. Fern id was usually to species level, but nor always. It even worked with Botrycium. Orchids were mostly to species. But I was surprised when it could not id Hooker's Orchid.
So, I'll keep experimenting with everybody hopefully tolerating this.
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Interesting! I've been using plantnet for trees and other plants and I've been having trouble with it dealing out range-inappropriate suggestions. I'll have to see how seek does
Yes, do - I have been pleasantly surprised. I started by checking difficult plants and moths that I already knew the identity of.
I have been enjoying using SEEK for more than a year. I too have noticed the occasional ID that is way off, but it is generally good with plants and insects. It seems to have trouble taking photos sometimes, so I have been using it by pointing it at my laptop screen of photos taken with other cameras. Yesterday, it identified a damselfly in my Michigan yard as a species that is mainly confined to eastern Asia. It also does not do well with birds or mammals...partly because it is very difficult to get a decent photo of these with a camera phone! But even using the technique described above, misidentifications of birds and mammals are frequent.
Thanks, I had not thought about using it with a photo on a computer screen. I'll have to try it.
The down side of doing that is that SEEK will then geo-tag the photo for wherever you are looking at the photo, not where the photo was taken! But there have been very few photos I've taken with my phone lately that I have uploaded to iNaturalist. It is a phone, not a camera :-). I have also used SEEK to view and identify the photo from the viewscreen on the back of my SLR, but this sometimes takes a bit of juggling...don't do it in a bog!
My assumption was that you were only using SEEK on your computer screen to confirm or suggest an ID. If the photo is already on the computer why not use that? I tried using SEEK to capture an image off of my computer screen, and it worked well enough, but the original photo was much better. Regarding bogs, since we have spent the better part of the last 12 years in and out of bogs weekly, if not daily from May until September (sometimes October), I am always securely attached to my electronics (camera and now phone). I once dropped a camera battery into a bog and obviously killed it.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. That is what I do now. But when I first started using SEEK, I did link it to my iNaturalist account and uploaded from the field, presuming that it would accurately tag the GPS coordinates, and I would swap the better photo in when I got home. But it was often quite far off, depending on how good the cell connection was in the field. So now I only upload to iNaturalist from home. Adding the species, date, and location into the EXIF of each photo lets iNaturalist automatically grab it when I enter the sighting. Except for the location, which I still have to do manually.
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