Amazing community to upload and find species of living things. The map exploration is fun to find some of my favorite plants and look out for plants during a hike. Very useful tool. App crashes when loading observations, browsing the explore tab, and made my phone freeze several times, but it might be my phone. But it still worth 5 stars. Hoping for future updates.
I love that I can identify almost anything and that it helps contribute to science. But I really wish once identified I could get some more information about the plant/ animal etc. Especially if it is native/ invasive. It would also be great if the conservation status was listed, and some tips on how we could help or encourage that type of butterfly into our garden (for example)
I think a lot if people misunderstand what the app does. It allows you to upload observations to the iNaturialist website, where people from all over the world can help narrow down your observation, which in turn documents wildlife. The AI learns from that, but since it can only learn from data that's wild, it can't help with the things like garden plants. That's where gardeners like me come in and try to help. 😁 it's a great community, and I've learned so much about the world outside my garden.
i love inaturalist, but the interface on the app is not great. posting observations is just ok, sometimes tricky. trying to look at other people's observations or just browsing through animals a lot of problems arise. i can't sort by favorites, recent, species, most of the stuff i like really. when im out i gotta rely on opening inaturalist in my browser which is a bit odd on mobile. inaturalist is a great community, i hope they can optimize the app so it's easier to access on the go.
Wonderful concept but poor execution. App is very slow and freezes often. Also, when you try to ID an obscure species, the app will show you a small number of reference photos or even no photos, even when others users have contributed countless research grade photos of the species. That makes it hard to ID. Seems like the reference photos are being pulled off Wikipedia although I'm not sure. Why not use photos users have contributed?
Update: not sure what's going for everyone having technical issues. I use it on iPhone and android both work well. Fantastic. Great way to catalogue your discoveries, easy to use, and a must have for anybody who is curious about what that weird growth on that tree might be. Start as a hobby taxonomist and get the input of professionals to become highly skilled at identifying plants, fungi, insects, arachnids, animals, and everything in between. Love it. Can't reccomend enough.
A great citizen science app! It's like a combination tricorder and logbook. I originally wanted something to help me ID what I saw on dog walks and remote work sites. I find it much easier to use the app to log an observation than the full website. The automatic ID feature is fairly strong for animals, a little less so for plants that aren't in bloom. If you prefer not to share observation data by default, try the iNaturalist Seek app instead, a pretty good casual field guide.
I tried many apps to identify the flora & fauna during my hikes and in my yard. This is by far the best. The review and suggestion feature by others is what puts it over the top. The side by side comparison feature is helpful. My only wish would be a few more pictures of some plants during the different phases of the season, but most have good reference pictures.
Basically Pokemon Go for nature. I love this app. My wife is into plants and I am into birds so we are constantly snapping shots of nature and posting our findings. The best part is how the app will suggest what it thinks you are posting so if you don't know a species, it will suggest one for you. I have learned a lot from this app, it really opens up your world when you learn new species. Only thing I would change is the ability to follow friends on the mobile version.
Really fun but crashes constantly. You can take a pic and it auto recognises the species of animal/plant with amazing accuracy! It's like Pokemon go but with real animals. Quite addicting. Only problem is that the app constantly crashes. It can't seem to load a page of images without crashing. It's been this way for years. Makes the app itself completely useless for browsing local discoveries because it crashes if you try. So I only use the app for posting pictures.
