iNaturalist 4+

Great But Lacking Features for Powerusers

So far, I'm really liking this update! The UI is a lot less clunky and is much more responsive than the old one. It took a minute to figure out how to bring back the more advanced editing, although I was somewhat disappointed when I did.

What I love:
- Batch upload of photos & sorting options
- Easier to navigate and much more intuitive UI
- Ability to save and come back to obs later without uploading them

What I'm missing from the old app:
- Ability to type in an address/coords for the location field (currently, only iNat Places show up and hitting enter/search does nothing if you try entering/searching for anything else)
- Adding obs to projects while uploading
- Date does not seem to accurately fill based on your current time when uploading photos.

What I would like to see that isn't in either mobile app:
- Batch editing/uploading obs with same time/location/etc.

Definitely a 5-star app if these things get addressed. It's already showing lots of progress!

Developer Response ,

Thanks for letting us know what you like compared to the Classic app! Can you send more details about a possible date error location using the feedback form in the app? That will help us investigate the issue.

If you have enabled location services for your camera, photos should come in with accurate metadata, and you can batch import up to 20 photos at once and group them. Either long press on the camera button, or turn on the advanced mode in settings to easily access the photo library to select multiple photos.

Overall Great! Two Suggestions

I’m very happy to see some of Seek’s best features integrated into iNaturalist. I’ll use iNaturalist much more now, especially since the AI camera is soooo much faster compared to Seek. Overall, I think this is a great next step for the app and have enjoyed using it so far. I hope the developers will consider two additions. First, it would be helpful to be able to copy the coordinates from one observation to another in the app. It is super annoying to have to zoom in on a map while looking at a rural area without a lot of landmarks to find the right spot when I could just copy and paste from another nearby observation. The search function also didn’t bring up some towns in Colorado as an option so the location/map feature seems a bit incomplete/unwieldy. (I’m also not sure why some of my observations didn’t have a location when the observations a few minutes later did.) Second, it would be helpful to be able to crop photos in the app itself. Otherwise, thank you for these great updates!

Too much reliance on AI

I’m struggling with a couple of the update features. Many of the ways to make observations scientifically accurate are buried or much more difficult to do. For example, you have to hold down the camera button to upload more than one photo/angle of an observation, which is not intuitive—there is also no button within the camera part (once opened) to change to more than one photo upload. Now the ID appears to be entirely based on AI, where you don’t have any clear way to suggest an ID that isn’t AI-predicted within the app. It feels like iNaturalist is moving closer to a pop science usage (Seek-ish) and losing much of what makes it scientifically valuable. Without intuitive ways for (newer) observers to know how to upload additional angles of an observation and suggest IDs that disagree with AI, it seems like the data will become increasingly less accurate.