Binomen takes one to three photographs of a plant, animal or fungus and suggests which of about 10,000 species it might be, with a probability for each. It is free, needs no account, and stores none of your photographs.
How it works
The app uses BioCLIP 2, a vision model trained on two hundred million photographs of living things, to turn your photo into a list of 768 numbers that describe what it looks like. It compares that list against one reference description per species — the average of fifty photographs of that species from the iNaturalist 2021 dataset — and converts the closeness of each match into the model’s own probability.
It shows up to three species when, together, they account for at least 80% of that probability. If no species is that certain but one genus is, it names the genus instead and says the species is uncertain. Otherwise it tells you it is not sure. A wrong answer with a high number is worse than no answer, so the app would rather say nothing.
Where the work happens
Normally your photograph is sent to our service, identified in memory, and discarded — nothing is kept. The app can also run the entire identification inside your browser, on your own device, so the photo never leaves it; that needs a one-time download of about 190 MB and is turned on for some deployments. The line beneath the results always says which of the two happened.
How accurate it is
On photographs the app had never seen, of species it knows, the first suggestion was right about 90% of the time and one of the three shown was right about 96% of the time. When the app gives an answer at all, the right species is on screen roughly 98 times in 100.
What it cannot do
- Cultivated varieties. The reference set is wild species. Garden roses, crop varieties and hybrids are not in it; the app will usually answer with the genus and say the species is uncertain.
- Things that are not organisms. It cannot tell a rock from a lizard by itself. A photo of nothing it knows should come back as “not sure”, but a confident wrong answer is possible.
- Safety. It is not a tool for deciding what is edible or safe to touch. See the terms.
Privacy in one paragraph
No account, no cookies, no photograph kept. We record anonymous usage events — which engine answered, how long it took, whether a species, genus or nothing was named — with no identifier of any kind, and delete them after 90 days. The full notice is in the terms.
Credits
BioCLIP 2 by the Imageomics Institute (MIT licence). Reference data derived from iNaturalist 2021. Species descriptions from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).