I think identifying mushrooms with these apps is a fool’s errand at this point. They are almost always wrong, unless it’s something very obvious and distinctive.
As someone who is learning(because I am interested, not to try and eat) it usually gets me close, and somewhere to start… Usually.
Well maybe your experience has been different from mine but the suggestions I get are usually very wrong. You can absolutely use it as a jumping off point for further research and verification but I am wary of people thinking that these apps are at all accurate for mushrooms. There was just an article of a guy who ate destroying angels because his app ID’d them as giant puffballs. This is not a level of accuracy that I can endorse when the consequences can be life or death.
Seek specifically has a warning as soon as you open the camera to start an identification. I personally would not trust it enough for consumption even without the warning.
That’s interesting, I’ve noticed recently that the iNaturalist identification has been suggesting wrong IDs on some very easy and obvious images like a pair of Killdeer IDd as a Hooded Merganser.
I tried on a different specimen later in the morning and it got to stalked puffball, I think it was. It was not a full ID, one dot from full.
Puffball, puffer fish, yeah whatev, close enough. :-D
I wonder how iNaturalist would do with the same image. I haven’t used seek before.
Seek is by inaturalist.
