PlanetCatfish.com

Before I go any further, here is my disclaimer: Maybe this functionality already exists on PlanetCatfish in an easily accessible manner. If that's the case, then it is just one more wonderful aspect of PlanetCatfish which I haven't managed to explore yet. But if it doesn't yet exist, I think it would be a really neat feature. Now - here it is:

Wouldn't it be nice if we could see all the photos and videos that have been taken of a particular waterway, all on the same page, at the click of a button?

This is what I think it might look like: Currently, the Cat-eLog main page lists species by family, by genera, by common name, and by synonym... but it doesn't let users look at locations. True, a person can jump to the Species Search page and simply select a specific "Distribution" to run a species search from there; but the problem with this is that the Distribution drop-down menu doesn't lead to more information about the location; it only gives us the names of fishes there. Also, this drop-down menu is disembodied from a map. And for a nOOb like myself, I have no idea where most of these location names are found! (e.g., Where the heck is "Bombo?" I suppose I ought to know, but I don't {my apologies to people who live there for not knowing where they are}). So... On the Cat-eLog home page, create a new link under the "Sections" heading called something like "Distribution," "Locations," or "Waterways." When a person clicks on that link, they are taken to a page which provides both a text-based menu (like the current distribution drop-down menu, for people who know where they want to go), and a clickable map-based menu (for people who just know an area, but don't have a specific lake, river or tributary in mind). These two menus would itemize all the rivers, waterways, and tributaries which are in the database. (This list would be an exact replica of the inventory of locations/names which are currently displayed when a person performs a "Species Search" and has to select "Distribution." But on this new page, the display could be simplified and cleaned up by using a clickable map which hyperlinks to the proper continent or regional submenus; and from there, the user could select a specific river, waterway, nation, or region.)

When a person clicks on any of the links in this new list, they would get redirected to a new page which displays thumbnails of all photographs/videos showing that particular location/habitat (this is somewhat equivalent to the display which a user can currently obtain if they type the name of a river or location into the search window on the Image Captions page, except I envision excluding photos of fish {but see below}. Also, the current search system requires that the user manually type in the specific river or waterway name they want, instead of displaying it as a map). The thumbnails would include all photos/videos for that locality: both generic photos/videos of the waterway, and specific photos/videos for microhabitats for particular species of fish. Hovering over an image causes a popup window to display the image full size (similar to what happens on the My Aquaria page). Clicking on the image redirects the user to the actual page where the image is housed, which might be on a particular species' CLOG page. If by chance there are no photos/videos of a particular waterway, the screen displays a simple message to that effect, such as, "There are currently no photos on file for this location."

I envision the location images/videos filling the upper portion of the page. Below this there would be displayed a complete "Species Search" for that particular location. (This is the same output that a user currently receives if they click on a Distribution location hyperlink for any species from its CLOG page)

I also envision changing the way these CLOG page distribution location hyperlinks work (see attached photo of CLOG page), so that they work in the fashion that is described above. In other words, if I am viewing the CLOG for and I click on the link for "Paraguay" under the Habitat Information>Distribution>La Plata, Parana, Paraguay, then I would not simply be sent to the Species Search for this location (which is what happens now), but rather I would be sent to the page described in this proposal - with the locality thumbnails for this specific habitat across the top of the page and the usual Species Search below that. The issue I am trying to address with this suggestion has to do with the current compartmentalization of location images. Most location images are found on individual CLOG pages for particular species. As a result, the images/videos are "linked" to the species instead of to the locality. For example, imagine that somebody goes out and takes a lot of photos/videos of a particular river or habitat. They also collect 2 or more species of catfish in this one location. Currently, when these images of the river are uploaded, they get uploaded to only one of the species' CLOG pages, not to all of the CLOG pages for each species collected there (and we wouldn't want to do the latter anyway, as that would be a redundant waste of server space). As a result, the other species' CLOGs will become separated from the photos, even though all of these fish were caught in the same place.

By linking the images to the location instead of the fish, and also by creating hyperlinks to the images from the CLOG pages and from the main Cat-eLog page, this allows users to find images for the same locality by navigating from any relevant species CLOG or from the main page, in case the user doesn't have a particular species in mind, but just wants to see what "Rio XYZ" happens to look like.

How might this feature be programmed? I imagine something like this: When a user clicks on a link for a particular waterway, e.g., "Upper Amazon," then a software "bot" will perform an automated image caption search for "Upper Amazon." All location results for that name will be displayed. Then below that, the page would display a standard species search for that same water way. The biggest programming challenge I envision is this: If we don't want the images to include photos of individual fish (e.g., something like this for the word "Trinidad"), then I don't know how your "bot" would recognize that type of image and remove it... But then again, maybe the bot wouldn't need to remove fish images, and the user could simply accept these additional images, too, as long as the total number of images/videos for particular location is not too great.

As I said in my preface, maybe this functionality already exists on PlanetCatfish. But if it doesn't yet exist, I think it would be a really neat feature.

Cheers, Eric

EDIT: A partial filter to exclude fish images could be accomplished by simply adding the word "habitat" to the image caption search function. This would help because many photos of habitats are labeled "habitat" in their caption. The risk, however, is that any habitat images which DON'T have the term habitat in their caption would also get lost from the search.

It's a nice idea, but I am not sure there is enough content on PC to make this worthwhile.

What would be cool though, is instead of using PC content, would be leverage the geo-tagged images that Google Maps uses. Even the most obscure places I can find many pictures of. For instance, here is the exact capture location for : https://ssl.panoramio.com/photo/83276496.

Hi Racoll,

racoll wrote:It's a nice idea, but I am not sure there is enough content on PC to make this worthwhile.

Good point. But even so, it seems that what content PC does have is fractured among the various CLOG pages, and as a result it is woefully underutilized as a resource. It would be nice to create a convenient tool which brings these images together.

racoll wrote:What would be cool though, is instead of using PC content, would be leverage the geo-tagged images that Google Maps uses. Even the most obscure places I can find many pictures of. For instance, here is the exact capture location for

Tatia musaica

: https://ssl.panoramio.com/photo/83276496.

This is an excellent idea. I had considered this in my original suggestion, but I didn't propose it for five reasons:

1. I didn't know if PC would be allowed to do that legally (are the images proprietary content for Google?);
2. I naively figured that the Google images wouldn't have photos of isolated streams and waterways (For sure (or not?), I imagine that Google images won't have the fascinating microhabitat images, close-up shots of the water's edge, underwater images (underwater substrates, vegetation, etc.), or the underwater videos in various streams that are available on PC; you know, the photos that are taken by collectors right where they lift a fish out of the water.). So I definitely wouldn't want to EXCLUDE the PC content in favor of the Google content;
3. I am concerned that the images Google does have of waterways might not be described/titled/organized in a fashion which is compatible with the current list of waterways used in the PC database (this would complicate the programming of such an automated search; however if you could translate the PC database into something like "representative" GPS coordinates or some other database of locality names, then this would be fine);
4. I figured that many of the images Google does have would be images of buildings and landscapes. AFAIC, photos of the local village or a road or a person's vacation photo of the Eiffel Tower (or whatever) would be clutter on the page. I suspect we might need some kind of filter to exclude photos like this if they appeared in the search results;
5. As I stated at the start of this post, I hadn't considered the incomplete nature of the variety of habitat images/videos available on PC.

The simplicity of my original proposal is that, for the most part, it uses code that already exists on PC (image caption search, species search by distribution, the distribution database, and the interactive map function as found on each CLOG page). The main work would be copying and pasting these tools together and then formatting them to display properly.

However, all the above concerns stated, if they could be overcome, then I would whole-heartedly embrace your suggestion and ask that we integrate both sources of info to create the image page - combine the photos on PC with the photos from Google. And if the concerns can't be overcome at this time, then I'd still like to see the PC content leveraged in this way, and the Google content could be added later as time and technology permit.

Thanks for suggesting that, Racoll. I think it would make the functionality much more complete.

Cheers, Eric

I really like this concept. I can see that there is potentially much more to be gained by including links to external images/videos too, but equally there is a problem that those links may become invalid and are outside the control of Planet Catfish. I presume that there is some sort of bot that can check link validity and remove obselete links though?

For example, I'm putting together a small biotope tank for my and and I found that the second half of this video was a great help in providing details of sand, rocks, plants, flow levels, and other fish:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/yGx__0JDZ ... ure=oembed

Would there be a way that Planet Catfish members could propose suitable links?

Okay, my idea is expanding or evolving a little bit; here's another way of potentially considering this idea:

Just as we have CLOGs (Cat-eLogs) for each species in the database, could we set up something like "DLOGs" (Distribution-eLogs) or HLOGs (Habitat-eLogs) for each of the 1,147 options available within the "Distribution" menu of the species search? For each location, the DLOG would contain at least a few elements:

1. It would begin with a brief definition or description of what area is covered by that particular name, along with a map showing the relevant area outlined or shaded for clarity. For example, using
   Corydoras aeneus
   which was mentioned above, what exactly is meant by the Distribution entry "La Plata, Parana, Paraguay?" Does this mean only La Plata within Paraguay, or does it mean all of Paraguay? and why, for this species, is there also a separate listing for "La Plata, Parana" without including Paraguay? What seems redundant and confusing in the current distribution description for C. aeneus is that the species search which is activated by clicking anywhere on the "La Plata, Parana, Paraguay" entry is exactly the same as that obtained if you click on the ""La Plata, Parana" entry. The problem is that neither of these entries is a nested description - if you click on the word "La Plata" in either of those distributions, you get the exact same result; if you click on "Parana" in either of those entries, you get the exact same result. So these two nested listings do not provide the reader with distinctively different location info. So for each name listed in the distribution, it would be nice to see or read an explanation of that location. (Now that I think about it, I suspect the redundancy created by multiple overlapping "nested" listings of the species distribution is another matter, independent of what I'm proposing here.)
2. After the description, there would be a search tool link: Just as every CLOG page has a search feature for that species (e.g., at the bottom of the C. aeneus CLOG is a link described as, "Search Planet Catfish for more on Corydoras aeneus"), the DLOG/HLOG could have a similar feature which is specifically designed to search within the "Travellers Notebook" forum, "Shane's World," and maybe also COTM, for additional info and images of that location.
3. After the definition/description, then all photos/videos attributed to that area would be displayed (I suppose that these features, the definition and the images, could be reversed - images first - just like in the CLOGS). The images/videos would consist of a mixture of two or three sources of photos/videos: (1) PlanetCatfish photos/videos which are currently posted to CLOGS from species that live in this area, (2) PlanetCatfish photos/videos taken at the habitat/location but not attributed to a specific fish (this functionality would be a new idea), and maybe (3) geo-tagged images from Google and perhaps Mol_PMB's suggestion of member-suggested off-site links (again, considering ownership/copyright issues and content control, both of these category (3) ideas would have to be figured out if they were going to work, to supplement the content already available on PC).
4. Finally, below everything already listed, the DLOG/HLOG could then include the list of associated species as mentioned in my original suggestion.

By creating unique DLOGs/HLOGs (or whatever "?"LOGs you think sounds good) for each habitat, this would add a functionality to PC that I don't think exists at this point: an ability to upload locality images that are not or should not be attributed to just one fish species. And fortunately (from a workload perspective), the DLOG/HLOG inventory would not be an ever-expanding list; whereas new species of fish are discovered and added to the CLOG practically every month, we are not constantly adding new rivers and lakes and oceans on earth at a comparable rate! LOL

Cheers, Eric

What I could envisage seeing, is PC leveraging not only geo-referenced images from Google, but using this in conjunction with published museum records of specimen distributions from GBIF. There's 147 geo-referenced records of C. aeneus on GBIF, and if we were to be able to tie these to public geo-tagged images, say within a 10 km radius of the collection site, we would not only know what lives where, but also what where looks like.

This would surely represent an untold bounty of information for hobbyists.

Nice idea, Racoll.

I hadn't used GBIF before, but now that I've tried it, it's definitely a website I'll visit and use again. That said, I'm still concerned about two principles here:

First is the issue of content control and usage rights. I can't help but notice that, besides YouTube videos (through PC's own YouTube channel), PC does not tend to use much off-site material as part of its main content. Instead, CLOGs have links to off-site resources, like this link to FishBase (which is another site I use frequently) at the bottom of the page: "Look up Corydoras aeneus on Fishbase." To that point, I wonder how acceptable it would be to integrate content from GBIF onto PC pages. But if we could, I agree that would be amazing.

Second is the issue of programming difficulty. I'm conscious of how many good ideas are already on the "back-burner" because of the time constraints experienced by Jools, Mats, and anyone else who is programming this site. So while I'd love to see this extra content (the GBIF maps showing specific collection sites is really... like whipped cream, God's gift to Earth), I think I'd rather seek a simpler, more easily programmed solution at first, and then add tiers of complexity over time. Of course, if programming this wasn't a challenge, then my concerns would vaporize quickly and I'd be completely on board.

Thanks for another good suggestion.

Cheers, Eric

@Racoll,

You have posted some lovely photos recently of the habitats of several cats. I see that since the cats are coming from the same locations, you were, by necessity, having to post the same photo in the Cat-eLog multiple times: e.g., image.php?image_id=19553, image.php?image_id=19552, image.php?image_id=19551, image.php?image_id=19555, and image.php?image_id=19557.

This would be a perfect example, as I'm envisioning things, of when it would be beneficial to be able to store or inventory the habitat photos as a single copy in a central place, which could be referenced and displayed on each species' CLOG page without having to add the photo to each single species' page.

Cheers, Eric

Yes, I mentioned a similar thing to Jools (regarding wasted disk space), but yes, maybe having a more organised way to access habitat information might be a good addition.

Eric,
I think you are missing a super important point. The habitat shots are the exact location where someone caught the fish profiled. They are not generic. Adding random pics of the same watershed would not be helpful to a specific species page.
-Shane

Take a look at

http://www.planetcatfish.com/common/spe ... ies_id=201

This is the exact spot we collected this sp. There are lots of other pics of the Rio Tinaco in the cat-elog, but they don't link to this sp because Jools and I did not collect this fish in those spots.

More habitat shots would be great, but they require someone to actually travel some distance, catch a specific fish, and then document the collection location with a photo.

-Shane

Shane wrote:Eric,
I think you are missing a super important point. The habitat shots are the exact location where someone caught the fish profiled. They are not generic. Adding random pics of the same watershed would not be helpful to a specific species page.
-Shane

Hi Shane,

Thank you for stating this. No, I'm not missing this point; I am aware that there is a huge difference between "habitat" and "microhabitat," and like yourself, I wouldn't want to confuse the two.

However, this problem would not be unique to how photos might be organized - This problem already exists in the PC database in regard to waterways. If you perform a "species search" and you search by "distribution," you are given results showing all fishes that are found anywhere along that waterway; the results do not bundle species according to which microhabitat they are from.

That said, I wouldn't want to promote that confusion either. In my suggestion I'm envisioning a page that stores all images from a particular waterway, so if you clicked on that water way, you would see the variety of habitats and microhabitats which have been recorded. But for a particular species, you could hyperlink individual photos from that main page which specifically relate to the fish you've captured. Again using Rupert's images as an example, this single photo would be stored with the waterway, but you could choose to include (by hyperlinking) this image on the photo page for each relevant species without needing to upload that photo four or five times. And if you clicked on that, it might present you a species list of all spp. linked with that image. This way, only relevant habitat/microhabitat images would display on the species CLOG pages, and the variety of images would only appear if you clicked on the name of the waterway, thus showing the variety of habitats/microhabitats present there.

Definitely, I would not want to misdirect users by presenting random images of a waterway on the CLOG of a particular species.

Cheers, Eric

EDIT: Just to be clear, I may be using the word "hyperlink" incorrectly. What I mean by hyperlinking an image to a CLOG page is this: When linked, the relevant habitat/microhabitat image would appear along with all the other images of the fish, as if the habitat photo were directly uploaded to that specific CLOG page. That way, a person clicking through all the photos of a specific fish would encounter this habitat image just as they do now, with the current organization/system on the website. But in reality, the habitat photo would have its actual "home" on a separate page devoted to the waterway.

Yes, I agree with the problems associated with the "distribution" function. For the reasons you state I was not a fan of adding it. That said, it was a TON of work heroically accomplished by Mats and there is value in it.

Jools could give you more background, but a lot of what gets done on PC is what people are willing to step up and take on themselves. I am sure that Jools or Mats could do something like you are suggesting if they had a couple of 100 free hours, unfortunately most of us contributing to the site can't because we are fish geeks and not computer programmers.

I hope that doesn't come across as negative. You have a lot of good ideas and I enjoy your contributions.

-Shane

Hi Shane

Thanks for the compliment, and no, your concerns are not negative whatsoever. This section of the forum is, after all, meant for suggestions, not mandates. And yes, those with the programming skills have lots of pressures already. I agree entirely.

Cheers, Eric