I am completely addicted to iNaturalist. I haven't discovered any new species, but I've learned a lot. Not too long ago there was some news about some high school kids having used it to discover two new species of scorpion.
It claims to be a social network, but it's user interface isn't engineered to keep your attention like others do - so there's a little bit of a learning curve to really figure out how to get the most out of it, but I'm a total addict now.
I have the app on mobile, but I really don't use it... I shoot all my photos with a traditional camera and upload them to the website.
It might sound silly, but I'm approaching it like Pokemon - gotta catch em all! I'll identify some taxon and then try to go get as many species as possible. For example, I'm now aware of at least 5 species of Sea Urchin local to me - I've got 3 on iNat. I've seen the other 2, but didn't get a photo, but I know how to find them so I'm headed back out. I didn't even know there were at least 5 here, let alone be able to name them. It's intellectually really addicting....
Something that surprised me is how many subspecies there are of checks notes everything! It almost seems like in the narrowest sense, almost everything is endangered (if you're considering subspecies and phenotype). Very interesting stuff. I promise I'm not a paid promoter!
Pro-tip: If you're uploading on the web browser and your pic doesn't have GPS coordinates, set the location before trying to identify the species. Setting the location helps the AI limit it's suggestions to the geographic area.
Another buried feature is being able to view your observations and species in a tree view. Go to Dashboard -> Profile -> Species (under your profile picture)
Here's mine [0]. I really like how I can drill down the taxon tree and filter to see just species and/or observations at any level of the tree.
Edit: Oh, and be careful if you're worried about metadata in your pictures. iNat doesn't strip it out. I actually kind of like that -- after poking around, it helped me identify my next camera purchase. But Somebody could totally dox me (well, de-anonify me) with the metadata in some of my pictures....
When I've done GPS stuff with photos in houses, I've lopped off decimal digits until the circle which it represented was sufficiently large enough. I typically lop to one decimal digit to give "close enough, but not exact".
That's interesting... I didn't realize that it worked that way. For example, I just assumed that something like 32N, saved in an int, would be interpreted the same as 32.00000000N -- I didn't realize that the number of decimal places implied precision/significant digits. I suppose it's not surprising, and it makes sense, but I hadn't really thought much about it before. I also suppose there are probably systems out there that don't work with Decimal-Degrees and do assume 32 == 32.000 because the devs weren't aware. Thanks for sharing!
> Recently I came across this tweet containing the image below and it made me laugh … albeit not in the original way the tweet intended. The tweet was joking that “Anyone is able to open a GeoJSON file” and included the Microsoft Word screen shot seen below as a response to someone else tweeting that “Handing in a project as @GeoJSON. Let’s see if I get the usual “I can’t open this file” even though […]”. What was funny to me was seeing longitude and latitude coordinates stored with 15 decimal digits right of the decimal point.
This app is fantastic. It's great to get children to explore the outdoors. My kids also love to trick it by taking pictures of hamburgers which get misidentified as mushrooms. So it's both informative and entertaining.
The inaturalist one lets you filter by what is near you as well as family, genus, kingdom etc. I wish it were easier to see for example what trees, spiders, algae and birds are in my area but that is probably a weird niche request. I used the local search to figure out what trees we saw near the shore in a place where the salt and wind stunted them beyond immediate familiarity. Especially cool is seeing the mushroom and fungi people find around where I live.
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app