Photos
Flowering Plants
Flower Shape -- 0% never -- 25% rarely -- 100% typical
Leaf -- 0% never -- 25% rarely -- 100% typical
Revisions
Revision 1 made by Steve Sullivan on September 20, 2026 07:22 PM
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Past Revisions
Revision 1 made by Steve Sullivan on September 20, 2026 07:22 PM
Photo Form Info
Whose photo can you use? -- You can use photos that are in the public domain. This includes photos
by employees of the US government when they are at work. As far as I know, we can use photos with any CC
license. We are not making a derivative when we crop and scale the photo. To make a derivative you need to
add original material or change the intent of the photo. For example, a derivative would be when the
photo becomes abstract art or is turned into someone's face. You can find photos with a CC license on
https://www.flickr.com/ and https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. Look in the WildflowerSearch
"Links to Plant Photos" list. The "Author's permission" spreadsheet lists people who have given our
project permission to use their photos, sometimes with conditions that must be satisfied. A few
people have given us permission to use their photos yet they have disabled Flicr's download feature.
In these cases, use a snipping tool to capture the screen image.
Select one of Basic, Flowers, Leaves or Seeds: First, select the photo you wish to enter
or alter. If you change the author name, links or credits you must go to the Done page and
click the Submit button to save your changes. If you enter a photo you must click the Send
button to save the photo. Before saving, check that you are saving the photo in the correct
place by looking at the message at the top of the page (Basic Photo for example).
Image Author(s) Field -- For people who have already contributed photos, use the name as it appears
in the "AuthorLinks" spreadsheet. This will make sure that their name is linked to their website. In
cases where you know the website but are not sure of the name you can search this spreadsheet for the
website. For new image authors, consider adding their website to the spreadsheet.
Link to license info Field -- For photos licensed with a Creative Commons license you can do a "copy
link address" on a link to the CC license and paste that in this box. Then, copy the part
that looks like "by-sa/3.0" and paste that into the "Permission" box.
Link(s) to pages... Field -- For Flickr photos, use the portion of the URL that looks like this:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/user_name/5021132130/. The rest of the line is not needed. After
completing the page, test the links to photos to make sure they work. You put multiple link into
a box by placing a comma between them. Occasionally, a link (URL) will contain a comma character.
This causes the link to be transformed into two broken links. Fix this by replacing the comma
character with sequence "%3C" which is the proper way to include the comma character in a URL.
Name Page Help
All subspecies and variety names are written without the
var. and
ssp. dividers.
This eliminates the confusion about the difference between a variety and subspecies and
recovers from those cases where collection records may use the wrong divider.
Accepted Scientific Name -- The accepted name must be a species name, not a subspecies.
The accepted name consists of a
Genus, a
species and
an
authority. The Genus and species can be changed in the upper box and the authority
can be changed in the lower box.
Scientific Names... -- In this section we enter rules for finding the herbarium collection
records for this species. The collection records are used to discover where and when the species
can be found. Sometime after changing these rules off-line programs will fetch the
collection records and build a new distribution map, elevation/observation chart and
change the search scheme.
Each rule may end in a value within parenthese. The value is the number of herbarium collection
records that were found. The parenthese and value is optional and treated as a comment.
In some cases the rule is simply the Genus and species of the accepted
scientific name. Sometimes multiple names have been used and each name should be entered.
Here are the specifics for making rules:
- Genus species Fetch all records for this species name including subspecies.
- Genus species – Fetch records for this species but not any subspecies.
- Genus species subspecies Fetch this subspecies.
- In the above forms an authority can be specified. This is done by following the name
with % auth where auth is one or more character strings that must be found
in the authority field of the species. It is not necessary to enter the complete authority.
For example, % Mill will match Mill. and Miller and (Mill.).
- Adding %– auth finds all records that do not contain auth in the
authority field.
- The above rules are used to specify the collection records that are fetched. After getting
those collection records we can then exclude some of them by making rules like those above
but preceeding the rule with a minus (–). For example,
–Genus species subspecies
is a rule that will discard collection records of a specific subspecies.
Example: Find collection records for Abies balsamea but not for subspecies lasiocarba or fallax.
Abies balsamea
–Abies balsamea lasiocarpa
–Abies balsamea fallax
Instructions for using the Photo Editor
Get the photo(s) you plan to use into the Downloads directory on your PC. Drag a photo on top of the
"No Photo" area and drop it. You can make it larger and smaller using the "Scale" drag bar.
(Click down anywhere in this bar and move the mouse right or left. Release the mouse button when
the size is right. Typically, this process must be repeated.) The photo can be tilted using the
"Tilt" drag bar. Make 90 degree rotations using the "90 deg" button. You position the photo by
doing a mouse down in the middle of the photo and dragging the photo to where you want it.
When you start, the photo area is a single window. At any time you can divide this area into multiple
windows. Do this by doing a mouse down near the right edge (or bottom edge) and then dragging the new
window left (or up). After multiple windows have been made you can adjust the boundary between
windows by doing a mouse down near the boundary and then moving the boundary. This works only as
long as the boundary is exactly the same length on both sides. You remove unwanted windows by dragging
the boundary so that the window is very small. It is removed when you release the mouse button.
When there are multiple windows only one window is selected. You select a window by clicking on the window.
The controls are connected to the selected window. Only the selected window is displayed with full contrast.
When your image has been composed you can examine how it will look by pressing the "Preview" button.
At this point you should check the contrast of each window. A contrast histogram is displayed for the
selected window. The right side of the histogram is for bright areas and the left side is for dark
areas. Generally, an image with proper contrast will use the full histogram. If it doesn't, drag the
cyan slider over to the end of the histogram. Moving the slider on the right will brighten the light
areas. Moving the slider on the left will darken the dark areas. The slider in the middle will darken
or lighten the gray areas without changing the most light or most dark areas. Sometimes this slider
should be placed under a broad hump in the histogram. When doing these adjustments it greatly helps
to have a display that is properly adjusted for contrast and brightness.
When your image looks right, press the "Send" button. This will transmit the image to the Google
Cloud. If the page you are editing originally had no photo, the new photo will appear the next time you
refresh the display. But if there was a photo, it often takes an hour for the old photo to get
removed from the internet. Pressing the photo "Send" saves the photo but does not save the information
in your form. And going to "Done" and submitting the form does not save the image you have made in
the Google Cloud. You must do both operations. (Saving the photo more than once does no harm.)
