1 Topic by Darwyn Sumner

  • Darwyn Sumner
  • Darwyn Sumner
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Topic: Images

Photography is a highly popular means of recording.

Morris RKA, 2020. Take nothing but photographs ... time for a reality check? British Wildlife 32, 118–124.

Recorder 6 needs an image module. Probably in the form of a drag and drop routine and a thumbnail creator.
The technology is all out there. iMatch can geotag via a mapping function and there are other geotaggers. Once geotagged you have 3 of the basic 4 "w"s. It's all in the EXIF metadata
The drag and drop technology can be found in iSpot, Flickr and iNaturalist
Lat/Long converters are to be found in the OS Batch convert tool at https://gridreferencefinder.com/batchCo … onvert.php so it's not hard to get OSGB from Lat/Long formats
All that's needed after the drag and drop is a taxon name.
To ensure the highest level of popularity it would have to extend beyond the UK

2 Reply by MikeWeideli

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Re: Images

Sounds like a good idea. Have you any thoughts on exactly what features you would like to see ?  R6 can already handle Lat Long conversion.

Mike Weideli

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3 Reply by Darwyn Sumner

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Re: Images

A good start would be to study the features in Photools' iMatch and the way that they are implemented. Particularly the use of the Maps module to locate and geotag.
There's a busy forum at https://www.photools.com/community/index.php and I think I recall biological recording being discussed there in the past. Its developer, Mario, is very communicative on there.
I can detail more at a later date.

4 Reply by Darwyn Sumner

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Re: Images

Curious that there is so little interest in the concept of some sort of image organiser. The trend to use photography as a means of recording is incontrovertible but in order to submit records extracted from them, users need to have some sort of image management system. To work on their pictures both before and after posting them to ID sites.
The nearest is iMatch, popular with naturalists but it has no mechanism for turning images into species occurrences. Best you can do with that is to laboriously copy occurrences onto a spreadsheet. Beyond that there is nothing, take a look at an enquiry on iNaturalist - https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-do- … ords/18401 - so worldwide there is nothing.
Was a survey ever conducted on UK users to find out how they organised their image collections, what they do with the identifications once they get them back from ID sites and how they ensure that they don't repeatedly upload the same material to recording ID sites such as iRecord & iNaturalist?

5 Reply by stevemcbill (edited by stevemcbill 08-12-2020 15:41:20)

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Re: Images

Darwyn, I must admit I find the iNaturalist photo upload procedure VERY intuitive and simple to use - I must do seeing as how I have tested it out with over 30,000 images this year.  The fact that it uploads photos swiftly, processes them to amend size and resolution, extracts the EXIF data for Lat-Long, and for Date and Time and displays that information under the photos for editing is remarkable.   The fact that it can then go on and use AI to attempt to ID organisms in the photos is nothing short of magical - sure it doesn't always get it right - not even humans can get IDs from photos in all situations BUT in some cases it does astonishingly well and it is improving each year as more photos are added to enable further training of the AI.

I would love to see an image management tool enabling such seamless uploading of images to iRecord.

I am just downloading the test version of IMatch to check it out - thanks for the heads up.

Steve

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6 Reply by Darwyn Sumner

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Re: Images

You've Craig Slawson to thank for bringing iMatch to the attention of many naturalists. We discussed it at NFBR meetings on many occasions.
You'll discover much about image metadata when using it. Not just EXIF but a whole bunch of Darwin Core fields built into the standard. Lots of potential for reading and writing essential species occurrence data to the actual images
Charles Roper tells me that the iNaturalist crew consists of 10 developers and 1 designer (I don't know if that includes the machine learning technicians) whereas iRecord has but one.
Oops - guilty of drifting off topic now.