eBird Update--Now embed photos in your checklists!

Here are a few more fun examples:

1) Project Leader Brian Sullivan loves raptors. This checklist is a moving tribute that shows why! View checklist

2) Project Leader Chris Wood has been presenting in Peru at the Congreso Nacional de Ornitología; not surprisingly, he has had some time for birding between presentations: View checklist

3) Not a rare bird (or a particularly good photo), but a cool sight from Project Leader Marshall Iliff! View checklist

4) eBird regional editor Jeremiah Trimble provides some tubenose eye candy in this checklist from Australia. Be forewarned, this checklist is sure to make you jealous! View checklist

Clicking on images in these lists takes you right to the image on the website where it is housed. These images will appear in the eBird Review Tools (for reviewers), in the online versions of the Alerts, and in the checklist views accessed from the point maps (or in your account via My eBird). They will not appear in the emailed versions of the Alerts.

Before we tell you how to do this, we'd like to clarify how and when we'd like eBirders to use this new functionality.

Guidelines for photo embedding

Although we want the photo embedding to be fun for eBirders and think it is a great way to document your rare finds or share a day's birding with friends, we do want to make a few recommendations for how best to use this functionality.

1) Although it is possible to paste photos in both your Checklist Comments (i.e., from the Date and Effort page in Step 2 of data entry), we would like to ask that photos of birds be pasted in the species comments for that species. This ensures that they will be useful for documentation for that species.

2) Photos in checklist comments might be of scenery, people and friends, or non-birds seen on your trip. Please use these as you see fit.

3) Please limit your embedded photos to one or two examples per species. We don't currently have a limit to how many photos can be shown, but remember that when the photos are embedded using code from the photo sharing websites they should link back to that site. We recommend providing representative photos that are helpful for documentation; the full suite of photos can be posted to your website.

4) It is very important that the photos you link to be of the actual individuals observed in the field. While it is not necessary that you have photographed the bird in question (i.e., they could be photos taken by a friend), posting photos of some other individual photographed somewhere else could be very confusing for reviewers, and other viewers, who interpret t as documentation of the bird you saw. Please use this feature to post images of the bird you observed.

5) The photos look best using medium dimensions. Most websites will give you an option of what size to display the images. We recommend using medium dimensions (about 400 x 400 pixels, or so).

6) It's important to realize that you cannot upload photos directly from your home computer to eBird--at least not yet! For now, a third-party photo sharing site must be used, but there are plenty of great free services for that available online, such as Flickr and Picassa.

Linking from Flickr

If you use Flickr (www.flickr.com), a free service for hosting your photos, then displaying them in eBird is quite easy:

1. Go to any of your photos uploaded to Flickr and click on the image to get the full view with the full set of options.

2. Above the photo there are Facebook and Twitter icons and to the right of that is a drop-down menu called "Share". Click on this and then select "Grab the HTML/BBCode".

3. Select "Medium" size for the photos and make sure the HTML radio button is selected.

4. Then select the text (one click selects it all), copy, and then paste this string of code into the eBird species comments.

Be sure that the photos are set to "public". When you save your eBird checklist you should see the photos displayed.

Fig. 1. How to embed photos from Flickr. Click the share icon at the top of the photo and you get a drop-down menu. Select the "Grab the HTML/BBCode" option and then click to select that text block. This is what you will paste in your eBird species comments.

Linking from Picasa Web

Picasa Web (www.picasaweb.google.com) is another free service for hosting your photos online. Here's how:

1. Go to any of your photos uploaded to Picasa and click on them to get the full view with the full set of options.

2. On the right side is a little chain with the words "link to this photo" and an "Embded image" box where you can grab the HTML code to embed the photo.

3. Before cutting and pasting this code, be sure to select "Medium" size for the photos.

4. Then select the text (one click selects it all), copy, and paste into eBird species comments.

Be sure that the photos are "public". The code that comes from Picasa is quite a bit longer and more complex than what Flickr uses, but it works just as well.

Other sites

It is possible to embed pictures from other photo sharing sites that provide HTML in this fashion. Look for this similar functionality and give it a try. If all else fails, or if you have a personal website, you can paste the URL into this bit of code and paste it into your eBird comments. Be sure to replace the instances of "http://imagefileurl/" with the actual URL to the image on your website!

If you also want viewers to be able to click on the image and go directly to the page where your image is stored, use the following:

<a href="imagesiteurl"><img src="http://imagefileurl/"></a>

and replace the instance of "http://imagefileurl/" with the actual URL to the image and change "http://imagesiteurl" to the URL of the site. Perhaps link to the page that shows other image of that species.

Sound and Video

It is not possible to embed videos or sound files at this stage, but you can link to them using HTML code. This will take you directly to the file in an outside site.

<a href="http://soundfileurl">Audio Recording</a>.

Here is an example from eBird programmer and Caribbean coordinator Jeff Gerbracht; listen to that nuthatch recording and then compare it to U.S. Brown-headed Nuthatches. The call is so different, they must be different species! View checklist

Listserv posting

If you post your sightings to your local listserv, this functionality makes it possible to post short notes with highlight birds, provide the links to the checklists, and for people to see the photos from within the lists. Although the "email" functionality within eBird has long been the best way to share eBird posts with a listserv, we would now recommend providing direct checklist links when possible. Just select the URL from your browser and paste it in and people should be able to link to it.

Wrap-up

We have some processes in place to try to correct for potential cut-and-paste errors and to keep excessively large photos from displaying. In many cases these will be automatically corrected and the photo will show up just fine. In other cases, the photo may not show up, but the checklist should still display normally. Please let us know if photo embedding causes any problems for you.

Here's one more of Chris Wood's checklists with embedded photos from Peru. Makes you sick, doesn't it! Look at that coot! View checklist