As the clocks go back and the winter darkness pushes us into the comfort of our armchairs, now is a good time to check through all those photos taken during the summer’s fieldwork. Are they all labelled with dates, locations and correctly identified? It is well worth capturing this information before we forget it. Ipswich Museum has a collection of several thousand slides from the late Francis Simpson which, despite my occasional nagging, he refused to annotate; the lack of details on where and when they were taken has greatly reduced their value.

For many people, photography has replaced collecting as a way of documenting their finds but, if they are to be as good as a herbarium specimen or pinned insect, we must ensure that they are properly labelled and stored in a system that can retrieve them when we want them. Most photography these days is digital and the quality produced, even by relatively cheap ‘point and click’ cameras, is often superb; with no expensive processing costs we can take as many pictures as we like. However, the cost of printing means that the vast majority of these images are just stored on computer, often with meaningless file names like ‘DSCN1621.jpg’ in a filing system based on the date the image was taken, or even worse, when it was saved to the computer. To find a picture we are often reduced to scrolling through the whole collection in the hope we will recognise it from a tiny thumbnail.

One option is to upload your pictures onto a Photo-sharing website. This has the advantage of providing a back-up in case your home PC has a meltdown, but it can also provide some useful tools to label and organise your pictures with. There are several to choose from and quite a few do not make a charge for a basic account. One of the largest is Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) - it provides a simple way to upload, store and sort pictures (and video). The tools allow descriptions and tags to be attached to pictures and, by dragging images onto a map, they can be ‘geotagged’ to add details on the precise location. It is also an easy way to make pictures available for county recorders or national experts to look at without clogging up their e-mailboxes with large image files; you can just send them a message with a link to the page your photo is on (every picture will have a unique url).

Registration is free and you have access to hundreds of millions of pictures with a high proportion of natural history subjects. There are many special interest groups which, once your pictures are uploaded, you can submit your photos to. These can be a useful way to get feedback on anything from identification to choice of lenses etc. (see piece below on a Suffolk Flora group). There are even groups like ‘ID please’ and ‘What plant is that? where you can post those mystery pictures and get others to help with identification. What the groups are offering is a structured form of social networking based on discussions about photos. If you get involved and start adding comments you will soon gather contacts from around the world who are interested in your work and can provide feedback on all sorts of subjects - a sort of electronic naturalists’ society, but without the parochial limitations of a counNovember 19, 2011 9:03ot give away your copyright. Images still have ‘all rights reserved’ unless you choose otherwise. Anyone wishing to use them must still contact you for permission and where necessary, pay a fee for the rights to reproduce it. If you are a specialist in one of the lesser known groups this can be a cheap way to advertise your wares. There are all sorts of controls on who can view and comment on your pictures; you can easily restrict access to friends and family for personal albums whilst openly sharing other sets with the world.

How do you go about getting names for all those unidentified beasts? Like most naturalists, my first approach is to flick through the picture books in the hope of spotting something similar. We can also search the vast resources of the internet for pictures and obviously there is the caveat that not everything on the web is accurate, but a little checking with other sources can usually confirm any doubtful ‘ids’. Put the Latin binomial of even quite obscure plants or insects in a search engine like Google (put inverted commas around it to search for just that combination of names) and you will usually get a mass of useful pictures, e.g. “Harmonia axyridis” in Google produced 9,680 images in a fraction of a second and even “Odontaeus armiger” produced a couple of useful pictures. A quick check will reveal that not all these ‘finds’ are pictures of the thing you asked for; some are misidentified and Google will also put up lots of other images linked to the page where it found the name. One of the problems with this sort of searching is the sheer volume of material, particularly if you don’t make your search criteria very precise.

What if you don’t have a name to search for, where do you start? Most image search engines use the title of the file (which might be an English or Latin name) and some check the text on the web page that includes the image, but they are not good for the more generic searches like ‘Green Dragonfly’ or ‘brown moth found in April’. This is where the tags used in sites like Flickr come into their own. Often, we might have an idea of the genus or family the mystery subject belongs to, but will want to use descriptive terms like colours in our search to narrow it down e.g. ‘Blue Geotrupes beetle’ or ‘short white Aquilegia’. Experimenting with this sort of search can provide a powerful electronic version of the ‘flick through the picture book’ method of identification. You might think that with no guidance on which tags to use, no structured set of keywords, this would be very hit and miss affair, but it is the sheer volume of material in the system that makes it work. Not all the images of the thing you are looking for need to be tagged with all the words in your search criteria, but enough will match some of them for you to get a manageable number of results to look through. I’ve tried this with quite a few American insects (there are, of course, a large number of participants in the States) whose name I have no idea e.g. pictures of an attractive black and yellow striped beetle sitting on goldenrod flowers were quickly identified using a search on ‘black yellow beetle goldenrod’, This pulled up several matching pictures of the longhorn known as ‘locust borer’ (Megacyllene robiniae) which bores holes in Black locust trees (Robinia).

I am not suggesting that this sort of searching will replace the more traditional methods of identification using books, keys, microscopes etc. and again, I must add the caveat that there is a lot of inaccurate material on the Web, but this should not deter the naturalist from exploiting its resources. There is some rubbish on the muchmaligned Wikipedia, but it doesn’t stop its being one of the most useful starting places for research on the Web.

Suffolk Flora Group

I have set up a new group using the Flickr photo-sharing site to post and discuss pictures of plants in Suffolk - visit http://www.flickr.com/groups/suffolk-flora to see how it works. Obviously I am hoping that some of these can be used in the forthcoming new Flora, but the resource should prove useful for many others who are looking for images of particular species and habitats found in the county. Several SNS members have already joined and I thank them for their participation. There are 380 pictures in the group already including many excellent photos from Steve Aylward, reserves manager with Suffolk Wildlife Trust. Many of the images are geotagged, but this is not essential and can be left off anything where the user wants to keep precise details of location confidential. Recently Ian Barthorpe from RSPB Minsmere contributed some lovely pictures of Round-leaved Wintergreen (Pyrola rotundifolia) found in September this year under willow scrub by a path at Minsmere. This is the first confirmed record of this species in the county for over 100 years, and it is interesting to note that the last record was at Ashen Spring, Theberton, less than 5 km away from the recent sighting. Francis Simpson’s comment in his Flora that ‘it may survive or re-appear in suitable habitat on a light, sandy, damp and mossy site among Heathers or Dwarf Willows, in the coastal belt of the County’ has proved to be remarkably accurate.

If you have pictures you’d like to share, please do consider joining. It’s free and it’s a great place to meet others with similar interests.