For a couple of years now I have been submitting my butterfly and moth picture sightings to the BAMONA website both for help in ids and to add new species to the lackluster checklist for my county. They are very helpful with ids, but the website is a little slow and cumbersome to submit sightings.

Recently I have been trying to id more non-lep insects from my yard and trying out BugGuide, which has a lot of experts, but is not super user-friendly for newbies. I'm still not sure if I am doing things correctly there.

I have also used e-bird to keep track of bird-sightings. But, they seem more interested in getting detailed complete sighting stats of everything seen for scientific purposes. I don't really want to count the number of house sparrows I see in x hours!

Now I have some cool fungi popping up in the yard that I'd like to id. This hobby is getting a bit difficult to manage now! Do I have to have a guidebook and different website for everything. The dragonfly and damselfly book I got is a little to advanced for a newbie and frustrating to use.

I saw in a post on the BugGuide forum about other similar sites i-Naturalist and Project Noah. After a quick scan I'm thinking they look promising and am wondering if anyone here uses them.

I like that the i-Naturalist one lets you upload photos in bulk and can get some data from the photo to fill in date, id (if tagged), and location (if gps tagged). It does all the kingdoms and helps with ids and keeping lists. I think I read you can enter a sighting without a picture too. That probably isn't used for any scientific purposes, but is good for your own lists. I think they have an app too for submitting sightings from your phone. It looks too good to be true and am wondering what you all think. I hope it is ok to post about it here. I don't think it is really a competitor for this site since it is about ids and logging sightings, where this is more for discussions.