Photos

Admittedly, my vision for this site has changed over the past year. I initially thought it would be more of a showcase for insect and spider photography with a fringe benefit of providing some natural history information.

Over the past year it has become clear to me that the site will be much more useful as a sort of virtual collection. A collection like in a museum, except we have photos instead of specimens. We can't collect as much data, but we have reasonably good data on place and time. As we gradually collect photos, the collection will become more valuable as we are able to see where and when various things occur.

With that in mind, any photo that's good enough to identify the species has some value. Even photos for the same place and time as ones already there are useful, because the number of photos probably indicates how common something may be (or at least how commonly found something is). The more photos we have of something common the more likely it will randomly appear in browse, which is desirable.

Here's my suggestions:

If the photo is good and we know the species, that's the best kind for the guide.

If the photo is bad and we can't be sure about what it is, that's frass.

If the photo is good enough to identify the species, I would lean towards keeping it, but use your own judgement. If you do move it to the guide, edit the photo and uncheck 'representative'. Only representative photos will appear in 'info' and 'browse'. All photos are visible in images, though.

Appropriately marking each image as representative goes a long way towards ensuring that the best photos appear in browse/info. Eventually perhaps there will be many representative photos even for particular species. In that case, we can pick the very best ones that illustrate the species and explicitly assign those to the guide page.

Thanks for the help, again. I don't think I have the option to uncheck representative...I've looked and can't find it.

I only reveal that for editors. Mostly that's just because most people probably wouldn't understand what it's there for. I'll think about what I can do about that.

is as a virtual museum. So how many photos are needed for each species? Just as many excellent ones that show all the characters needed for identification. What would be more useful than duplicate or mediocre images (mediocre in the sense that although they may be great images with great composition, they do nothing more to help characterize a species) is more Info for a species. As an example, I chose the fly family Syrphidae as there have been a few photos of syrphids posted lately. Toxomerus marginatus has 8 images, 1 of which, #10916, seems to show all that is needed for id purposes. The others might be considered excellent photos but don't add anything to the excellent #10916. Actually, they show that the species occurs in, at least, Minnessota, Maine, and North Carolina, #10916 is from Virginia. However, T.m. ranges from Quebec to British Columbia, s to California and Florida; and also in Central America. Thus an image from Georgia would tell us what? But if I had a photo from New Brunswick that WOULD be earth-shattering. So, more Info on a species rather than more duplicate images; and of course, more images of species not previously illustrated.

I think we can meet both visions. I would say the museum side of things are the images you see in browse and info. The behind the scenes collection is what you see in images. We want to pick the most exemplary images, the representative ones, and display those in info and browse.

I don't want people to have to give too much thought about what to do with something. It just might be too tedious to go looking and deciding whether a particular image offers new value. Someone working on a particular guide page, however, probably should look at all the available images to decide what should be representative (and don't forget to include all life stages).

Imagine a new tab for the guide pages called 'collection' or something like that. Clicking on that will show a map filled in for all the places for which we have images for the thing in question. Further, there could be histograms for what months it's been found, even discriminating for immatures and adults. I think that has value.

The only reasons I can think not to keep these other images would be for server space (not an issue) or because they dilute the good images. I think the last one is answerable by the representative system we already have in place.

but it is not a bad idea to make people think, probably the best way to learn. I bet that in the long run, thinking about an image will give the artist a better understanding of both entomology and photography than if they just submitted another bug photo.
I love the idea of a new tab for "type specimens" and also that of a map (so glad you suggested both as you will have to spend the time writing the programs!). A map allowing for the range of a species in NA to be lightly shaded (when knowledge is available) and then to have darker shading for the states, and provinces, from where you have voucher photos will be most useful. Histograms are really only useful for quantitative data; a simple listing of months is all that is needed.

I encourage everyone to do their best to identify their specimens before posting here. That's the best way to learn.

The mapping work is actually already in progress by Mike Boone, one of our contributing editors. Initially it will just show the locations of our photos, sort of like what you see at the USGS site (example), but only for states/provinces.

I've been thinking about making the maps just part of the various ways we can analyze the data from the collection. The histogram idea was just one, based on what I see in some books, like Glassberg's Butterflies through Binoculars.

Here's some other random examples for why the other photos might be useful. The multiple photos might point out regional variations. For some things (e.g. caterpillars) we might capture in photographs the range of foodplants. For mating photos, we might document when mating occurs and perhaps shed new light on sexual dimorphism. We might document unusual behaviors. I'm sure we could think of lots of other reasons that photos are valuable beyond their identification value.

We've had the same struggle. One additional question is not only does the guide have your species, but does it have an image from North Carolina? While we would hope to replace our images with better ones down the line, if we have the only image from Illinois, we tend to leave it provided it is reasonably focused and might help with future IDs. But we do figure it is our job to move our images to frass if that's where they really belong. It will be interesting to see what others say on this.

With spreading I was not so much talking about the number of images but more about the groups dealt with. But still, if you do a few every day, we can enjoy helping you out even longer. Maybe even until the flood of images from the coming season hits us. :-)

Paul

http://www.diptera.info

I think I am catching on. I also think I have enough photos to last well into bug season....but maybe a lot are duplicates(same bug different pose)...especially since bug season is already starting here. I already took some fly, cranefly, spider, and assassin bug photos. I think I'll try to do five in every section I have left per day. Beetles, flies, moths.