If you give the Litterati App permission to use your phone's location services, then your geolocation data is captured and saved the moment when you take a photo. This will allow you to go about your litter clean-up without worrying about adding your location.

You can toggle permissions on and off in your phone's settings for the Litterati app. For iOS devices, go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services > Litterati App to make your selection. For Android, since all models are slightly different, please review the steps for the make and model of your phone.

If location services aren't shared or if there are network or GPS connection issues, the location of images may be inaccurate or non-existent (no location data would be attached to the image). Currently, there is no way to add the location to images after uploading them.

At Litterati, we transform every image into meaningful data by automatically adding a geotag + data, & timestamp to the litter. Our LitterAi helps you add labels or tags to images: Object, Material, & Brand (OMB), i.e What is found? (eg: Can), What is it made of? (eg: Aluminum) and Who made it? (eg: Pepsi)

However, technology isn't perfect and we still need you to tag your data to help improve the LitterAI. Also, without your tags, we won't be able to confidently say what that item actually is.

Litterati then compiles that cleanup data into a robust database of litter maps around the world. Using your tagged cleanup photos, the Litterati team can ask questions such as, "How does the weather affect the types of litter thrown?" and "Are there more cigarette butts littered near bus stops?".

Challenges are set by anyone. Be it a local community member, a global NGO, or a company. By participating in their challenge, you're helping provide data to their account which hopefully they can use to help create systemic change.

You can join a challenge in two ways:

By Join Code

By Browsing

You can join as many challenges as you like, your data will go to all of them as long as you're within the challenge dates and radius.

Join by Code:

You have two options to join by code. If you're new to Litterati, your onboarding process will ask for it right away. If you're returning or a veteran user, you can go to the challenge tab and click on the blue "Join A Challenge With A Code" button.

Join By Browsing and Clicking on Participate:

After getting settled into the Litterati App, you can click on the Challenges tab and click on the "Join" button at the top right. From there you can scroll through the Featured or Local challenges available for you to join. Simply click on the black "Participate" button to get started.

Your challenge participation count might look different depending on where you look. There are a few reasons why this could happen.

In-App, we are showing the active participant count of a challenge. Meaning that anyone who's contributed at least one piece towards your challenge.

In the Dashboard, we show active participants, but we also show stats of users who once participated in the challenge, uploaded their litter, and then unparticipated in your challenge.

In the report, we are showing all litters uploaded with a challenge. So if your Challenge is a Featured Challenge*, then any of the challenges connected to it will be counted. This means that you see participants from connected challenges, who might not actually be participating in your Featured Challenge, but merely in the connected challenge.

Please let us know if you have any further questions at support@litterati.org

*Featured Challenges are only available for upgraded partner licenses.

The Litterati Open Data Portal allows anyone to access the raw data created by the Litterati community.

This information includes:

LitterID

Raw litter labels(A string of user-generated or LitterAI-confirmed labels)

Location (Latitude/Longitude)

Country

Date

In your account, you will be able to visualize your data in two formats. First, you can see your data aligned to the Open Data Portal (see above) and the other is Litterati Filtered view. In Litterati Filtered view, you will see a combination of Litterati filtering and LitterAI tags (Litterati´s proprietary image recognition model to identify Object, Material, and Brand).

How Litterati Litterati Filtered View works:

Litterati Filtering:

Litterati will filter the raw litter label into a standard format of object, material, and brand. For example, if the user adds “butt” and “paper” to the litter photo, Litterati will filter the user input to “cigarettebutt” and “cellulose acetate.” We do this in order to improve the standardization of the naming conventions since many times user labels can contain spelling mistakes, spaces, multiple languages, and synonyms or aliases of the same item. We constantly update our filtering system to improve its performance and is based on the community experience we have developed over the last several years.

LitterAI:

LitterAI is a collection of multiple image recognition models focused on identifying object, material, and brand of all litter. We process all uploaded images through our latest models to identify what is in the litter images. Then if we determine that the precision and accuracy are of a high enough confidence interval then we will apply the output of the model to the litter item.

How that becomes the Litterati Filtered data:

It is the combination of the above two processes to achieve the best Litter data possible, which allows for the best determination of what is in the litter image.

The Litterati Filtered data is post-processed to determine other relationships. The category can be related to a behavior or a sector to make it easier to determine how to tackle the litter issues. For example, “cigarettebutt” & “cigarettepack” are related to the smoking category. Whereas “straw,” “cup,” “lid,” “can,” and “bottle” are all mapped to the drink category. By categorizing litter, we can determine which actions should be taken to tackle the specific problem since actions on smoking litter are very different from drink-related items.

Litterati currently categorizes items by:

Weight/Volume:

Understanding the relationship between litter’s weight, volume, and count is critical to understand the severity and size of the litter problem. From the Litterati Filtered output, major items such as bottles, cans, and cigarette butts are matched to standardized weight and volume to provide a more accurate picture of the litter issue.

International Standards:

There are over 50 waste taxonomies across the globe and everyone looks at taxonomies with a slightly different lens. With our granular taxonomy, we have been able to map to several of the major standards and we will add more in the future. Currently, we use a combination of the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic (OSPAR), Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO); Break Free From Plastic (BFFP), and National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) labeling taxonomies.

Brand Parent Corporations:

With thousands of global brands and hundreds of companies responsible for producing them, it is important to match these individual brands to their parent companies. For example, Fanta, Monster, Dasani, Fernandes, Aquarius, Maaza, etc. are all owned by the CocaCola Corporation. Litterati is able to match brands to their corporate parents at scale. Currently, we have matched 500 brands to their respective parent companies and we will continue to add more in the future.

We have currently opened up our database as we wanted to ensure our policy serves everyone as many members of the community, including schools that use the platform and wish to keep their data private.

If you are a research institution or citizen scientist who's looking for a subset of data, you can simply visit our open data portal. It has now become easy for anyone interested in helping the greater good through data to do so through our open data initiative.

To tag your images, please go to the Activity section of the app to enter your Gallery.

Tap into any photo to add tags to it. If the LitterAI is active, you will see tag suggestions from our AI-based litter recognition model.

From there, please enter your own tags in addition to the suggestions. The best practice is to have 1 - 3 tags per image. Which would be 3 tags: 1 each to describe the object, the material, and the brand of the litter. Of course, there are times when it is unclear what kind of object it is, what material it is made from, or what brand it is, in this case, don't worry about that and move on.

You can view your impact map and your gallery (Activity Tab) in the app. You can also log in to your account on the Litterati Dashboard for more in-depth looks at your data as well as the ability to download your data into a .CSV file.

You may also check out the open data portal.

If your question isn’t part of our help center, please reach out to us at support@litterati.org.

You may also come to join our Discord Server where our community sits and they can assist you. https://discord.gg/xXYhNgppnk

The Litterati community has developed a standardized labeling system that helps users and Litterati's Machine Learning Model (LitterAI) to more accurately label images of litter.

Click here for the updated tagging guide:

https://litterati.notion.site/litterati/Welcome-to-Litterati-s-Labeling-Guide-6467b8e02657465a8ae63d9913ed567f

Currently, you are able to edit your challenge up until it goes live. Once it does so, you'll have to reach out to Litterati to update any parameters (goal, end date, or challenge name.)

There is no way to delete a challenge from the App. However, you can deactivate your challenge from your user Dashboard. To do that you simply sign in to your dashboard from a web browser, click on the Challenges tab, and click on the active toggle on the right of the challenge.

Please note: users who created their account with AppleID, your information has been obscured within our system as part of Apple's effort to uphold privacy and you might not be able to log into the dashboard. Please reach out to support@litterati.org for more help with your challenge.

The app is now going to be available in English, Dutch, German, Spanish, French, Japanese and Swahili.

To delete your account, contact us at support@litterati.org with the following information:

1. The email address that is associated with your account

2. Whether or not you would like us to remove you from our mailing list

3. Feedback on what you think will improve the Litterati experience

While your feedback is not mandatory, we would love to hear your reasons for leaving us so that we can find ways to make Litterati better for everyone. Once we have your information, we will have your account deleted in 1-3 business days.

The Litterati App is available on both the Google Playstore as well as the Apple Appstore.

There are a few known devices that are not compatible with Litterati.

These models are:

1. Sony Xperia

2. Nokia 5.3

3. Nokia 5.4

4. Huawei mate 10

If have any of these models or are experiencing an issue where your camera is a black screen, rest assured as we do have a workaround for you.

To do that please reach out to support@litterati.com.

Come join our Litterati Discord Server
https://discord.gg/xXYhNgppnk

You can edit your personal information within the Litterati App. To do so please follow these instructions:

First, click on the profile bubble at the top left of your screen then follow the below steps depending on what you'd like to edit.

1. Photo:
Tap on "Edit Profile".

Tap on the camera icon next to your current profile photo.

Choose from "Take Photo" or "Select from Gallery"

Tap on the "Save" button on the top right to save your changes.

Full name/Display Name/Bio

Tap on "Edit Profile".

Tap on the entry field with your current full name, display name, or bio.

Edit text, and tap on "Done" when finished.

Tap on the "Save" button on the top right to save your changes.

2. Gender

Tap on "Edit Profile".

Select your gender from "Male", "Female", "Non Binary".

Tap on the "Save" button on the top right to save your changes.

3. Location

Tap on "Edit Profile".

Tap on the blue pin icon, and the location will automatically update to where you are now.

Tap on the "Save" button on the top right to save your changes.

You can also change your settings for the app on the following functions:

Turn on/off LitterAI Suggestions. This is a function that allows LitterAI to suggest object, material, and brand tags when uploading litter photos.

Turn on/off Upload only via Wi-Fi. We recommend that you turn this function on to prevent the app from using up your data.

Turn on/off Maximum Location Accuracy. We recommend that you turn this function off to prevent the app from using up your phone battery. However, please note that the GPS location will be off by a few meters.

To change settings, scroll down on the Profile tab and tap on Settings. You can turn the three functions on/off by tapping on the corresponding buttons on the right.

To change your email address, please contact us support@litterati.org.