For a landscape photographer, there’s often a need to identify certain flowers or plants that you either photograph or appear in a photograph. Since I’m not a horticulturist, I used to identify them when back at home, since I did not want to schlepp a guide book with me. Now I can do it on my iPhone while being out and about.
EarthRover, the publisher of Tom Harrison’s maps for the iPhone (see our review), also publishes a series on wildflower guides. I recently got the Sierra Nevada Wildflowers app and tried it out on my iPhone.
First, you need to be patient when installing it. It’s a 145 MB download and it takes time to complete installation. Once installed and the app is launched, the user interface is designed to give you multiple ways to quickly find the information you need. You can either browse (by thumbnails arranged by color and family or by browsing the alphabetic index of Latin and common name) or search based on blooming period, plant type, habitat, name or keyword. If you created bookmarks in previous uses of the app, you can use access these as well. I quickly figured out that searching based on criteria with a subsequent selection by picture was the quickest way to success.
The easiest way to find flowers that you encounter during a photo-shoot: Specify search parameters (left image), then look at the resulting images and pick the flower (right image) you wanted to identify
Overall, I liked the app a lot:
- 488 species of flowering plants (690 pictures total) are covered. Plant descriptions include plant type, appearance, flowering period, habitat, distribution, and links to external pages on the Jepson interchange and CalPhotos.
- Search based on pre-defined criteria allowed me to quickly identify plants, even while I kept on hiking
- Browsing through pictures includes narrowing down the list by color of the plant. This is especially helpful in conjunction with context search
- Bookmarking allows me to quickly bookmark a plant when found, so I can research them more after returning from a trip
- Additional online resources are available for all plants – at least 2 external links per plant. When following the link the content is displayed within the app.
- A glossary of most commonly used English and Latin terms.
What I am missing:
- Note-taking: This is by far the biggest miss. There is no way to take notes when bookmarking a plant or to even export the info to a note-taking tool such as EverNote. I can copy the info after setting the bookmark and paste it into Notes or EverNote, but that defeats the purpose. I would have wished for note-taking, esp. to note when and where I encountered the plant. While at it – allow me to include my GPS coordinates into the notes.
- Only one image per plant with no zoom capability, but then I understand the trade-off (the app is already 115 MB). You can always go online to get more images, although you are most likely not getting Internet access while hiking in the wilderness
- I am spoilt by the slick user interface of iBird. While the Sierra Nevada wilderness app’s interface is fine and it gets me the info, its interface just looks less-than-stellar.
- At $9.99, the app is not inexpensive. But then, you do get high-quality information that is helpful when hiking and photographing.
Verdict: Recommended
Available maps: Sierra Nevada Wildflowers, Wildflowers of the Western Plains, California Wildflowers, SMMPlants – Plants of the Santa Monica Mountains
Price: $9.99 per map
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