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Use BirdsEye.Photo To Up Your Photography Game

BirdsEye’s free photography website is a comprehensive library of photos submitted by a nature-enthusiast collective from across the globe. Thanks to users like you, we have amassed one of the most complete and high-quality photo collections of birds, odes, butterflies, and more!

If you aren’t already using BirdsEye.photo, here are some of the benefits of becoming a contributor:

  1. Get a free membership! For every 20 photo submissions, we will provide users with a free, one-year, BirdsEye membership of their choice. Want a second year? Great! Simply submit another 20 photos! Or, if you’d prefer, use those 20 additional photo submissions to get a different regional membership!  You could choose from any of our BirdsEye memberships.
  2. Keep track of your photo life list. BirdsEye.photo is a great way to keep track of the birds, odes, and butterflies you’ve seen and photographed. Plus, you’ll be able to easily sort through these photos taxonomically, alphabetically, or by submission date. 
  3. Share your photos and get credit. If you’re anything like us, your photos amass, unseen by the public, on your computer. Here’s a way dust off those digital photo folders and share them with one of the largest birding and nature communities on the planet! The photo site allows other users to browse, rate, and help identify the birds in your photos. Plus, your photos will be eligible for use in our newsletters, on our website, and in our Apps! (With due credit given, of course.)
  4. Educate the masses. While your photos are out there earning you credited recognition, they are also helping to educate other nature enthusiasts as they explore the world around them. The BirdsEye Finding Guide app, Dragonfly ID app, and Bumble Bee Watch app all use user-submitted photos to help nature enthusiasts identify species in the field. Meanwhile, our Daily Bird app displays user-submitted photos every day, helping birders to refine their bird identification skills.
  5. Help us make some of the highest quality apps.  Users can rate photos based on how well the bird is displayed in the photo. We want photos of animals as they appear in the field to help users identify what they’re seeing in the field. For that reason, we need to make sure our apps’ photos do just that! Can you see the bird clearly? Are important field marks present? User ratings help us determine the best photos to include in our nature apps. And, if you think a photo has been misidentified, let us know! We strongly rely on our users to help us ensure the accuracy of our apps’ photo collections.

    Dragonfly ID, BirdsEye Finding Guide, and Daily Bird all feature photos submitted by users on the BirdsEye.Photo website

Sign up for a free BirdsEye.Photo account today and begin contributing to the collection. To get started, visit Birdseye.photo and follow these easy steps: 

  1. Create a free account;
  2. Add your name and website to your profile so people can find more of your work;
  3. Submit your first photo!

By now you can tell how much we want you to contribute to Birdseye.photo—but not just to help us complete our collection! While your photograph submissions will help refine the quality of our apps, they’ll also help motivate you to lengthen your own photograph life list and educate the nature-enthusiast community.

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Using the BirdsEye Smart Search

So you just jumped off the plane on your dream birding trip to Ecuador. You bought the book and you’ve been studying it and think you have a handle on the 1660 species listed. Or maybe you’re just on your first trip to the Texas Coast for Spring Migration. A small yellow bird darts by. All your study flies right out the window. Where to start the search? Was it a finch? A warbler? Something else you’re not considering? The BirdsEye Smart Search can help.

smart search orioles

You can access the smart search from either the home screen or the from the nearby species screen. Touch the magnifying glass next to the search bar on the Nearby Species screen. The Smart Search lets you filter the results by colors, size and habitat. You are first asked to pick the colors. Don’t stress too much about selecting the exact colors– the Smart Search algorithm is looks for the closest colors.

Let’s search for that little yellow bird. You also saw some black on it so select black too. Did you also see some white? Select white also.

Next touch the ruler and select S for small.

Birds are usually very tied to a habitat and the Smart Search lets you select for that. Touch the tree icon and you can select by up to two habitats. You have 6 habitats to choose from: wetlands (water and cattails), grassland (green grass), woodlands (trees and hills), backyard (shrubs and birdfeeder), urban (buildings), and nocturnal (moon and soaring owl).

Imagine you’re at High Island so let’s select a woodland habitat and backyard type habitat. Touch the down arrow to hide the Smart Search filters.

Scroll down the list and you should find you just saw your life Magnolia Warbler!

Hints if you don’t find your bird:

  • Try going up and down in size by one bird. Size is often hard to judge and changing the size a little will often make your bird pop out.
  • Try eliminating one color, especially a minor one.
  • On the filter for the Nearby Birds try selecting the current month instead of Recent Weeks. The Recent Weeks uses the bird recently reported to eBird. The Select Months feature uses the eBird data for that month for the last 7 years. Maybe your bird is the first of the season reported and hasn’t been reported yet. The select month will account for that. In less birded areas maybe there isn’t much data for the recent weeks. The select months will account for that too.
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