LEARN ABOUT CREATURES

For those of you who like to organize your nature photography collections, and especially to those of you who want to offer your photo collections of various species and nature preserves to a larger database of biological information - you can add tags to your photos to help make them more accessible to computers.

Well, good news. We're working to make this a little easier to do.

Geo and taxa-tagging your nature photos

Many people get Pro accounts on Flickr. We recommend this as Flickr is easy to use, and there are already hoards of other nature photographers using Flickr.

1. Sign up for Flickr
2. Edit your Local Biology account settings, setting up your Flickr ID. In the future you will be able to more easily connect your Flickr photo sets with descriptions with your observations and blog posts with Local Biology.
3. After you go picture taking, you usually upload your images to Flickr. Using a 'batch uploader' makes this a little easier.
4. Organize your photosYou can put your photos in sets and collections. You can title them and add descriptions. Your friends and other people can comment on them.
5. Participate in online nature groupsSometimes you will get requests to be included in other photo pools, or to have your photo used on another resource.
6. Set up your photo permissions Setting the Creative Commons license is important here.
7. You can 'geo-tag' your photos. This is part of the 'machine tags.' This is pretty easy to do. I will go on Google maps, figure out where I was, and find the latitude and longitude.
8. Rounding your latitude and longitude If you do not want to identify species to an exact location, try rounding your latitude longitude, or using a city capital's latitute longitude. This may be important if you want to talk about roughly where a species was found but want to protect nestlings and other animals from possible poachers. Join discussion on this topic
9. Making tags accessible to Local Biology We're working so that certain photos in your photo collection will be accessible to this website. Give them the tag 'localbiology' for now. There will be more precise tags that we will tell you about in the future.

10. Taxa-tag your photos If you would like to make your photo collection more searchable, you have the option to use special tags that integrate with a variety of Flickr and other applications.

    Here's an example:
    Click "machine-tags"
    taxonomy:common="Pin oak"
taxonomy:bionomial="Quercus palustris"

    Here are the tags currently supported by the Encyclopedia of Life efforts:

    taxonomy:kingdom=*
    taxonomy:phylum=*
    taxonomy:class= *
    taxonomy:order=*
    taxonomy:family=*
    taxonomy:genus=*
    taxonomy:species=*
    taxonomy:binomial=* [e.g. genus and species with a space between them]
    taxonomy:trinomial=* [e.g. genus, species, and supspecies with spaces between them]
    taxonomy:common=* [the common, or vernacular, name]

    *replace with the name

    You can geotag your images using Flickr's Organize mapping tool. Or if you know the location you can add it manually:

    geo:lat=* [replace the star with the latitude]
    geo:lon=* [replace the star with the longitude]
    geo:long=* [replace the star with the longitude - equivalent to geo:lon]
    geo:alt=* [replace the star with the altitude]

    Encyclopedia of Life Flickr photo group
    More about taxonomic machine tags

11. Wikipedia tagging format. Wiki Tree of Life project
12. Learn more about making sense of species you've seen

A word of caution

Bear in mind that every little digital act you make also further supports tagging that isn't as nice and wonderful as tagging to save the planet. "Machine tagging" is that same thing as when you're on facebook and your friend labels a picture with your own name. This enables anyone to peer into your private life. Similarly, tagging for species removes some of the anonymity of species which has actually helped to protect them.

Join in the discussion on this issue

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