Underwater Photography - Fish Database

[davidecullen]

Underwater Photography - Fish Database.

Our mission is to provide an online resource of photographs of
underwater life in it's natural habitat. The site has navigation
tools that make it easy to browse fish from a given region,
any selected species, just your own pictures,
the latest entries or the top rated photos. The site has the
organization of a scientific database but maintains the feel of
a photographers home page. We intend it to be easy to use the site
for identifying fish but to keep it fun for the more casual browser.

It's completely free to sign up and submit your own photos, as underwater
photography is a passion of mine and not work, so please join in helping
to build this into a useful resource. We started the site with just
200 of our own pictures and the site has already passed the 500 mark.
I have added a "Wanted Posters" section, for displaying photographs
of fish that we haven't managed to ID, so we're always keen to find more
experts to drop by and take a look. There's also now a quiz to check your
own id skills.


The site is:
http://www.fishdb.co.uk


Regards,
Dave
dave@fishdb.co.uk
http://www.fishdb.co.uk

[admin]

Hi david,
What is special about your database?
I mean aren't there many such sites?

[davidecullen]

Differences compared to scientific databases:

(1) Pictures are only of fish/life in their natural habitat i.e. no pictures of dead fish set alongside rulers or fish in aquariums or fish held proudly by fishermen.

(2) Photos are not necessarily cropped down to just the individual fish, but may be posted on merit of their aesthetic qualities, i.e. several fish in a nice underwater landscape

(3) Allowing search by photographer means that people can use the site as their own photo gallery, whilst at the same time sharing the pictures with others.

Differences compared to many individual users home pages:

(1) Truly database orientated. Search fields include, "family", "species", "Latin name","country","dive site","ocean","user","date submitted", thus giving a wide variety of means of browsing. You can look at all fish taken from a particular dive site, or browse just a particular species etc. These are normally features of the scientific databases

(2) A large number of pictures taken by many different photographers from many different locations around the world.

Differences to any other sites i've so far come across:

(1) Pictures are stored in three different formats. Small thumbnails allow you to quickly browse a lot of pictures when trying to identify fish. A standardized 600 pixel wide version of photos allows you to view five pictures per page in a size that is normally large enough to see most detail. Finally the full resolution of the picture as submitted can also be viewed. This is useful in pictures with multiple fish, where you there might be a tiny juvenile damselfish amongst a big crowd of larger fish.

(2) ID quiz is not a static quiz, but randomly selects pictures based on your choice of search, so you can quiz yourself on fish from the caribbean for example or limit yourself to just parrotfish. At the basic level, the alternative answers include any other species, so this is for beginners who are learning the basic fish shapes, but at the harder level it specifically selects alternative answers from the same species where possible. Further enhancements are in the pipeline to add more levels of difficulty (for example to quiz people on the various phases of wrasse of parrotfish).

(3) The person submitting a photo can add their own comments, so they can point out the cleaner wrasse at the mouth of another fish etc.

There are many fish sites around but I never came across any with the features I wanted to see, which is why I started working on this site.

[rebaccawood911]

Hello David, nice things you have told about the fish it is good article.....



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