← All Apple listings

iBird Photo Sleuth

by Mitch Waite Group more by this developer →

#49,035 of 719,896 by ratings on Apple · #869 of 14,873 in Reference

View in the Apple store ↗

Compare with another extension

Category: Reference

Description

This new update to iBird Photo Sleuth now includes access to our ornithology experts who will help identify your bird if you want more help. The “Help Me Identify a Bird” forum has been around for 10 years and has over 100,000 members.

Every now and then an app breaks out from the pack with features that are simply astonishing. iBird Photo Sleuth fits that mold; use its machine learning "brain" to identify a photograph of any bird of North America, regardless of the photo’s quality. Photo Sleuth uses Apple’s new CoreML machine learning system to figure out the species in even the most distorted, fuzzy and poor contrast photograph. The Photo Sleuth app has been “trained” by over 2 million photos of bird species to ID birds with uncanny accuracy.

You can use iBird Photo Sleuth in the field -- no internet connection is required, because its CoreML database is contained in the app. Take a photo with your camera or select it from the built-in iPhone Photos gallery (Dropbox, Google Photos and OneDrive coming). Don’t worry if the bird is a tiny blob in the frame; Photo Sleuth is smart enough to find the features that distinguish it from all other 900+ bird species of North America.

After you submit your photo to the Sleuth, it will give you a list of its top 3 guesses as thumbnail sized images. Each will display a “Confidence” value between 0% and 100%. When the Sleuth is really sure of its analysis, it will produce a high value; when unsure it will display a low value. If the app thinks that you have submitted a photo of something other than a bird, it will display “Not a Bird.” Of course, some people’s faces look like birds, so it may still suggest a bird species. For example, my selfie came up with “Not a Bird” for the #1 spot and the Barn Owl for #2.

To help confirm the 3 guesses made by Photo Sleuth, you can tap on any of the thumbnail images to open more species details, including an enlarged illustration, text that explains important field marks and a range map that shows the migration coverage of the bird. The range map includes a range and habitat paragraph that helps confirm that the species is indeed located in your GPS area. A future update will add our “Birds Around Me” technology to further narrow the choices that Photo Sleuth guesses. On this same screen you may open a rich content species account in our iBird app (should you have it on your phone) to review much more information, including playing the bird’s songs and calls, seeing similar birds, behavior details and much more.

Sharing of your results can be done two ways: you can share your photo and the Photo Sleuth guesses with your friends via Apple Messages, Email, Facebook, Twitter and all other functions such as printing, which appear on the standard Apple activity menu.

There is also a button for optionally sharing your photo and the results of the Photo Sleuth guess with Mitch Waite Group, so that we can improve our neural network. Both correct and incorrect guesses help us improve the performance of artificial intelligence. Or course, we only use the photograph for training, and the copyright remains with you.

Alternatives to iBird Photo Sleuth

Name	Ratings	Rating
iBird Pro Guide to Birds by Mitch Waite Group	6,924	4.3	compare
Photo Cut Out Erase Background by Ganesh Nayak	6,745	4.3	compare
Pencil Sketch Photo Camera by 云涌 段	6,341	4.5	compare
Photo Collage HD Pro – Pic Frame Maker Grid Editor by JINMIN ZHOU	4,636	4.7	compare
AR Translator: Translate Photo by BrainMount Ltd	3,808	4.7	compare
Translate - Text Speak & Photo by Shenyang Nian Xue Technology Ltd.	1,820	4.6	compare
AI Translator:Voice&Text&Photo by THREE TIGER NETWORK TECHNOLOGY LIMITED	877	4.6	compare
Bias Room: K-Pop Photocards by Anykraft PTE LTD	683	4.8	compare
Background Blur - Photo Focus Edit.or for Blur.red BG Effect.s & censor or hide face by Ganesh Nayak	616	4.5	compare
iBird Ultimate Guide to Birds by Mitch Waite Group	568	4.5	compare

Growth

Change in ratings, scaled to each window from the real gap between crawls. A window needs a full period of history before it reports anything.

History

Tracking since 09/05/2026. History accumulates as changes are observed — check back soon.