On-device identification

Modern phones can run a reasonably large vision model locally, which means the whole identification can happen without a network request. For birding this matters twice over: your photographs stay on the device, and the app keeps working in the places birds actually are, where the signal usually is not.

Both Feather Trove and Merlin document on-device identification. One caveat worth knowing: if your originals live only in cloud photo storage, the operating system may still need to download them before any app can read them, which is a separate thing from uploading them for analysis.