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.

We recommend using images no smaller that 480px in width or height. When running detection and ID on assets, images smaller than 480px x 480px are resized up, which can cause blurriness, which in turn can cause unusual detection results.

Happy uploading! :)

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