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eBird & Flickr -- Share Your Bird Photos

June 13, 2008
eBird & Flickr -- Share Your Bird Photos

1st cycle Little Gull, Union Springs, Cayuga Co., NY 22 May 2008. Photograph by Chris Wood.

We receive many requests from users who would like to be able to upload images of birds that they have photographed. This is particularly true for rarities (birds seen outside their normal range, or at an odd time of year). In the long-run we would like to integrate this feature directly into eBird, but we have come up with a short-term solution. We have created a group within the popular photo-sharing site, Flickr (www.flickr.com). We encourage anyone who has photographs of rare birds to share them with this group (making sure, of course, that you have already submitted the record to eBird!). Our intent is to provide a venue for people to photographically document species seen outside their normal range, outside their normal seasonal occurrence, or unexpectedly large counts of birds.

To submit photos to the eBird group, you will need a Flickr account--sorry, there's no getting around that! You can create a free account though, and upload up to 200 photos. We know that Flickr isn't perfect in all respects, but we hope that there are some eBirders out there who will enjoy the ability to share their images in this forum. This also allows us to focus our development efforts on core eBird functionality.

Here is the URL to the Flickr eBird Group:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/ebird

You can also click on the groups tab within Flickr and search for eBird. For information on uploading images, adding images to a group, joining a group in Flickr, please use the help options within Flickr.

Please tag your photos with the common and/or scientific name of the bird and the location (include county and state/province) and date (date is often automatically included).

We know that there are many other photo sites that people prefer for one reason or another. If you prefer to use any of them to share your photos, that's great.

If you do have a photograph of a rare bird that you enter into the eBird database, we, along with our regional editors would love to know about it! Please consider adding a note in the species comments section of the checklist indicating that you have taken them. If you upload these to Flickr, or to any photo-sharing website, it is helpful if you can provide the URL. Even if you just have a photographs stored on your home computer, it is useful for us to know that they exist!

Good birding!

Team eBird