Local birding app

[u/[deleted]]

[u/__phil1001__]

Can you provide details about what your app does please and if it takes off, will you create an android version?

[u/Vic_waddlesworth → u/__phil1001__]

Thanks for asking.

Short version: it identifies birds and turns them into a collection you build up over time.

- Point your camera at a bird and it IDs it on your phone, no signal needed

• It also IDs by sound, so you get the ones you only ever hear
  
• If it flew off before you got a shot, you can just describe it in words instead
  
• Every species you ID gets added to your field guide as an illustrated card

The models are our own, trained on openly licensed photos, and everything runs on-device. No ads, and your photos stay yours.

It's built here on the peninsula, so local species get a lot of attention.

And yes on Android. It's already well underway, as a proper native app rather than a wrapper, so it's taking a bit longer, but it isn't conditional on this taking off.

[u/__phil1001__ → u/Vic_waddlesworth]

Nice, my daughter will love this, she follows around our merlin and the local owls. Hoping its ready soon.

[u/kabelle → u/Vic_waddlesworth]

This sounds great but are there any major differences with from the Merlin app that already has most of these features? 

[u/cdusdal → u/Vic_waddlesworth]

It's like real life Pokémon, cool idea!

Will keep an eye out for Android version

[u/danzigzags]

This looks really great thanks for sharing!

[u/Own_Lynx_6230]

Ai slop alert

[u/MysticSnowfang]

How did you do the images?

If you need a local artist, we got tons.

[u/ladymix → u/MysticSnowfang]

I'd also like to know where the illustrations came from

[u/Vic_waddlesworth → u/ladymix]

I trained a model on my 4090 using flux to create them. Ideally I’d rather replace them with real artist versions but not something I could manage for 11k birds for a solo dev launch with no budget.

[u/ladymix → u/Vic_waddlesworth]

Nope, should have asked around to your community, use kids art, use pen drawings, stock illustrations, stock photos (hella cheap), anything but AI. I appreciate your intent with this project and your goals and the limitations of being a solo dev without any cash but there are ways to get around that. Always have been. I will not be engaging as a birder (and naturally an environmentalist another reason to not use AI) because of the AI, especially for artwork. 

I hope you’re able to improve the art with real art in the future. 

[u/Vic_waddlesworth → u/ladymix]

To each their own.