keeping your own bird finding records software (1 Viewer)

since owning a camera i have started to collect pictures of birds,flowers and butterflies but wanted to put them into somesort of database or record which would contain a picture,name,location and notes but could search by name or location to see what i have found in what area.
What do you guys use for your database records, i dont think excel is any good i tried.

Hi!

I use Bird Journal to manage all the wildlife records we collect.

http://www.bluebirdtechnology.com/BirdJournal.aspx

It is easy very easy to create a complex hierarchy of locations to record where you saw different species, as well as add your own attributes such as altitude etc.

The software comes complete with a comprehensive list of world bird species built in, but if like us you record other wildlife then you can create your own checklists for other fauna and flora. Unfortunately creating such checklists is still a time consuming business as there is as yet no option to import checklists created in Excel for example. Hopefully the developers will soon remedy this as it is the one big failing of the software.

As for photos, it is very simple to upload photos into the database to go along with sightings. Records are easy to search.

Take a look, it might meet your needs

looks real nice but too pricey for me and the trial version only allows a few entries.

Rodopchanin,
welcome to birdforum

gaddypaid,
take a look at the ACDSee lineup. I use the pro version to also have some raw editing options, but if the only thing you want to do is organize, then ACDSee 16 is US$60 but the previous version which can just about the same will cost you US$20: http://www.acdsee.com/

There is a free trial which is only limited by time (1 month).

Niels

Another option would be Lightroom (a bit more expensive but not a lot more so now). It allows you to define your own metadata, and you can then search by the metadata. If you have it, you can also add gps coordinates, and it allows you to see where your photos were taken on a map.

Whether or not its search features would be sufficient for your needs is a bit hard to tell: Do you just want to be able to find all photos for a specific named location, say, or do you want to be able to sort your photos by location on the fly?

Andrea

Why not start your own website/blog and put them on there? You could have the different locations etc.
A friend of mine did that, he has a map that is colour coded, each colour corresponding to a certain breed. I'll try and find a link so you can have a look.
But it's fairly easy to do, use one of the website builders around, I used these for my business website http://website.1and1.co.uk/website-builder but they also have templates for personal ones and are pretty good value.

Evening.

I use Birdjournal also, and find it very good. Fortunately I got the complete package at a good price. There are a lot of individual checklists for insects and plants that people have posted.

Regards
Sandy73

I've started using HandDbase on my iPad (Android also possible).
My database has all my photos, links to sounds from xenocanto and descriptions plus more. Since it's a relational database it also lets me keep my sightings records, and it's searchable.

My original version was in Excel, but I outgrew that. If you want your own, personalised system, look to learn to use a database program.

By the way, I also use Lightroom and that is fine for a basic look-up system.