Photography guidelines

Photographs should be contributed to Wildbook for the purposes of identifying individual animals. Photographs with the following characteristics are more likely to lead to successful identification:

  • Photo is of a distinguishable individual (i.e. free-standing or clearly in the foreground)
  • Individual is relatively large in the frame and has decent resolution
  • Individual is located near the center of the image
  • Individual is in focus and not blurry

Conversely, these characteristics make the identification process more difficult:

  • Individual is part of an overlapping herd or group of animals
  • Individual is relatively small and/or contains few pixels
  • Individual is out of focus and is blurry (from being too far from or too close to the camera relative to the plane that is in focus)
  • Individual is located around the edges of the image
  • Individuals are significantly (greater than 25%) occluded by other animals or objects
  • Individual is significantly (greater than 25%) off the edge of the frame of the image

For more specific instructions on how to photograph a given species, navigate to the Learn > How to Photgraph page in the appropriate Wildbook.

Image formats and sizes#

Wildbook accepts images in a variety of formats, including JPG, JPEG, PNG, and BMP. TIFF files are not allowed.

We do not recommend using images larger than 1600px in width or height. A compression ratio of 90% is sufficient. Uploading larger photos with higher compression ratios will not improve the quality of your identification results. In fact, unnecessarily large images put a strain on the server and cause identification to take longer.

Happy uploading! :)

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