Fish Photo Database

I'm setting up an online resource of underwater photographs, intended mostly

in helping to identify fish, but also as a means of letting people display their

pictures, rather than tucking them away in some drawer, or some folder on their

own computer.

http://www.fishdb.co.uk

I've entered a couple of hundred photos taken mostly by my Father and myself

so far, but hope to find others interested in sharing their pictures with the rest

of the world.

The web site is database driven and I intend to make it as easy as possible for

people to browse through fish of a given region, or particular species. It's also

possible to rank the photos, and coming very soon there'll it will be possible to

view the photos so you can quickly get to see the best photos.

Please take a look and if you have any ideas for improvements or you'd like

to take part please register for free and get in touch.

Regards,

Dave

dave@fishdb.co.uk

The idea is good, but no offence, the quality of the first images I looked at on the first page are awful, I'm not saying you need the best images in the world there but the ones you have will not get people coming back to use the site. Sorry.

David,

It's a good idea, and you've certainly snagged a good name for the website.

It certainly would help to keep improving the image quality over time, but that's inevitable in this sort of large-scale enterprise. I'm perennially replacing photos on my website once I've taken better quality ones.

You mentioned that the site was intended mostly in helping to identify fish; for this purpose I'd suggest you display more photos in a smaller thumbnail format on each page, and allow the user to bring up a larger photo by clicking on the thumbnails. This might well reduce your bandwidth requirements, and it would make it much easier for users to identify their fish when the family is large. For instance, I started with the butterflyfish galleries; there must be a hundred species and even if you show only one photo per species that would mean 20 pages to slowly flip through. However, you already have three photos of single species like the banded butterflyfish, so that means a whole bunch more pages to go through. Since we're on that topic, you should probably only show photos corresponding to different sexes, morphs or other variations of the fish; there's no point showing multiple images of the same fish if the different images all show the same morph.

[edit] I forgot to say, the Latin names of the fish really should be in italics with the species name all in lower case. If you make that change now while the database is small then it'll save you a lot of work later!

Richard.

Good idea, can't have too many fish ID sites... BUT, too many ads!

Allowing people to bring up the highest resolution version of photos on the database seems to be inviting theft!

Richard.

I for one would be interested in a fish ID site to keep up my skills during my long "dry spells". Picture quality is an issue when it comes to focus, colour, motion blur etc but I'd actually like to see some shots that would typically be considered poor because they show the fish from the top or back, instead of the picture-perfect side-views (all facing left) as in the Humann & Deloach book. Some shots with much of the fish hidden behind coral would be ok for me too.

For fish ID training it would be nice if one could pick a geographic region and get a randomized slide show. If you annotate images with "best shot" "side view" "other view" "partial view" then people looking for great pictures can select the first group, people new to fish ID can pick the side view class and those looking for more of a challenge can try the other/partial views. Another annotation of possible use would be common/uncommon/rare so novices can focus on fish they are most likely to see on their next trip whereas more experienced IDers can avoid the yellowtail snappers, blue tangs etc.

I'll try to get some Caribbean fish to you in the near future.

Bart

You can get a good idea of how a fish database should be done by checking out www.fishbase.org - Some may find it a little too science-oriented, but it's an awesome resource.

Thanks for all the tips. I've already started implementing some

of the features, like getting the best photos displayed first, which is

obviously vital. I think fishbase.org is great for checking up on something

once you already know what it is and they have so much information it's

great, but it's a different kind of beast compared to what I'm aiming for.

Many thanks to those people that have already signed up and started submitting

pictures. It's been a great response. I will definitely get around to doing

smaller thumbnail views to make it easier to hunt down the fish you're looking

for. It's a project that is evolving all the time.

http://www.fishdb.co.uk

Regards,

Dave

dave@fishdb.co.uk