Looking for a reliable, easy-to-use app to help you identify plants "in the wild"? Join the club. And then read this post, to find out how I got on with the most popular free offerings out there
I recently switched from the "classic" iNaturalist app to Seek, and like it a lot more. Seek seems to have trouble with plants that have only a couple of leaves, as well as situations where there's foliage from multiple plants in the photo. Understandable, I guess. I'll have to check out PictureThis.
That’s interesting. I’ve found Seek to be less reliable with certain garden/ornamental plants, and better with wild/weedy ones - I wonder if this is just down to how much data it has to work with, and the fact that people are more likely to use it to identify a cute flower growing between some paving slabs than they are in a garden setting…
Happy to see that my preferred Seek app did pretty well in this rumble! Seek also has a little tab at the bottom where it can give you likely local options if it can’t narrow down the plant to a species. I’ll give PictureThis a chance too!
Yeah, Seek was a revelation when you told me about it, and I like its attitude - the fact that if it doesn’t know, it tells you as much. Better than a random shot in the dark
Thanks for this! I’ve been using PictureThis for just shy of a year, and while I do like it, I’m also glad to see there are other options to try out as well.
I’d love to know how you get on with any of the others. There’s something simultaneously appealing and discomforting about the absolute certainty with which PictureThis presents its results
I recently switched from the "classic" iNaturalist app to Seek, and like it a lot more. Seek seems to have trouble with plants that have only a couple of leaves, as well as situations where there's foliage from multiple plants in the photo. Understandable, I guess. I'll have to check out PictureThis.
That’s interesting. I’ve found Seek to be less reliable with certain garden/ornamental plants, and better with wild/weedy ones - I wonder if this is just down to how much data it has to work with, and the fact that people are more likely to use it to identify a cute flower growing between some paving slabs than they are in a garden setting…
Happy to see that my preferred Seek app did pretty well in this rumble! Seek also has a little tab at the bottom where it can give you likely local options if it can’t narrow down the plant to a species. I’ll give PictureThis a chance too!
Yeah, Seek was a revelation when you told me about it, and I like its attitude - the fact that if it doesn’t know, it tells you as much. Better than a random shot in the dark
Thanks for this! I’ve been using PictureThis for just shy of a year, and while I do like it, I’m also glad to see there are other options to try out as well.
I’d love to know how you get on with any of the others. There’s something simultaneously appealing and discomforting about the absolute certainty with which PictureThis presents its results
I've only found one good one, Candide; it's not perfect but better than so many which insist on telling me that a daffodil is a dandelion - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.candide.app&hl=en_GB&gl=US