The Smart Way to Identify a Bug in a Picture
The absolute best option is sending a real insect specimen to an insect diagnostician, but that kind of help is costly and time consuming. Do not despair! The smart way to identify a bug from a photo you took, is to ask an expert. That’s right, people can still provide the best help identifying insects in pictures compared to any other approach. Even if you only want to know which species of pink grasshopper you have, there are some brilliant experts out there that will offer their help for free. In addition to this website, the author of InsectAsylum uses, contributes to, and trusts the BugGuide, and there are some amazing folks that do similar work at Reddit and WhatsThatBug. All you have to do is seek an insect identification after you upload a picture. Simple as that.
The Fast Way to Identify a Bug in a Picture
You may not be patient enough to wait for somebody else to help you out. Free is great, but we live in a world where information is usually pretty easy to get, and often the timing of that is measured by the millisecond. Not being a bug expert yourself, you might find it hard to do the right internet search on "house bug identification" to find the insect identification help you need. You're going to be wasting lots of milliseconds of your day. The app store has some new bug identifier apps with a five star rating! Awesome sauce, or Snake oil? To be honest, these bug identifier apps are not quite ready for widespread use.
However, there is one super-fast app that is totally worth trying out. It is not specifically an insect identification app and it was only accurate 9 out of 20 times. It had reasonable guesses when used to identify bugs by picture, so it shows promise. That app was Google Lens. It is great for the impatient person. This method rapidly can point you in the right direction about half of the time. Good luck!
Well, It's been a few years since I evaluated any apps and now it's time for a 2024 update. In fact, a graduate student devoted a portion of their life toward thoroughly evaluating these bug picture identification apps. So, I am relying on their input and the answer in 2024 is...they are getting a little better.
It boils down to two factors: accuracy and usefulness. Accuracy is identifying the bug picture correctly, and usefulness is more nuanced. Suppose you know you have a spider picture and the app accurately tells you that you have a spider picture. Well, that's not very useful. You wanted to know what kind of spider it was and go find out if it is a dangerous spider. Now suppose it had informed you that it is a wandering spider in your picture while you were on vacation in Brazil. That's pretty useful!
If you combine accuracy and usefulness, the insect picture apps still only help you out about half the time. For example, Google Lens and PICTURE INSECT are a little over 50 percent accurate, but when they do identify something, their usefulness is over 90 percent! So, about half the time you get an accurate and useful result (not much change since I first wrote about Lens).
On the other hand, the most accurate insect picture identification app is SEEK by iNaturalist. It boasts about 95% accuracy even with lower quality images. However it has only 41% usefulness - meaning that most of its identifications are accurate at a level like "insect" or "beetle" instead of down to the specific family, genus, or species level.
Users of SEEK have also reported that it is hard to get a lock on some insects, and in my own tests I find the app is unable to save a lot of my pictures. On the other hand, it gamifies the search for insects and that makes it fun! So, what is the best thing to do with these apps?
Focus on getting a crisp image of an insect on a clean background. Don't use too much digital zoom if you are using your phone (up to 2x is good). Then, increase your odds and submit that image to each app to see what they give you for answers. If it is really important to you, submit the same image to an expert for confirmation.
