As part of recent improvements to our site, the Galleries section has been completely overhauled. But it’s far more than just a redesign – we’ve increased image dimensions and file sizes, simplified the uploading process and introduced video sharing. Here’s more on the changes, and how they benefit you and your photos on the site:
- Image dimensions: one of the biggest improvements is that images are no longer limited to the old maximum width of 640 pixels. In fact there’s no restriction on width, just a 5 MB file size limit, so your images can now be viewed at a larger size and show much more detail.
- Uploading: there are now two easy ways of uploading your files. Once you have prepped your image in JPG, GIF or BMP format, you can upload it either by clicking the orange ‘Choose photo’ button or simply dragging and dropping your file into the uploader.
- Video sharing: the old Galleries had no video functionality, but now it’s very easy to share your bird videos from YouTube or Vimeo. Simply copy and paste the URL of your video into the upload form, include a relevant thumbnail, fill in the details and submit. Your video will display in the Gallery in a similar way to still images, but with a movie camera icon in the top-right corner.
With these simple but useful improvements to the new-look Galleries, it’s easier than ever to share your images and footage of birds. In fact we now have material on some 5,700 species, making this section an extremely useful free resource for the birding community. Can you help plug some of the gaps? If you have images or movie clips of scarce, range-restricted or infrequently photographed species, you can share them in the appropriate galleries section and help make this major image repository even more complete.
To upload a photo, head to www.birdguides.com/gallery/upload and choose the relative gallery (Birds, Butterflies & Moths or Dragonflies & Damselflies) to begin the upload process. A short walk-through on how to upload an image can be viewed below.
Recent site updates
Our technical team has been working continuously on ongoing improvements to many areas of the website, as well as our iOS and Android apps. Among the latest updates are:
- The BirdMap now has a full-screen option (click on the expand symbol in the top-right corner of the map), and has been tweaked so that it shows species name, location, time and date when the cursor moves over each report pin (you’ll need to be logged in with a Bird News Pro or Bird News Ultimate account to see these full details).
- Species search functions have been added to both the Butterflies and Moths and the Dragonflies and Damselflies galleries.
- In the apps, the time parameters for ‘Nearby’ news have been extended so that all messages for the area over the previous three days are now displayed.
