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I kept running into the same problem: needing transparent PNGs of organisms (animals, plants, fungi) for design/education projects, but everything was either paywalled, had messy licensing, or required manual background removal. Existing solutions:
- Stock sites: $$$, restrictive licenses
- Wikimedia Commons: mixed licensing, photos have backgrounds
- PhyloPic: silhouettes only, not full specimens
- iNaturalist: photos with backgrounds, not cutouts So I built specimen.gallery – a searchable library of transparent specimen PNGs, all CC0 (public domain). Organized by scientific taxonomy. No accounts, no attribution required, just download and use. Stack: Rails 8 + Postgres + Fly.io. Server-rendered, no React/Next.js, just clean HTML. Using Cloudinary for auto background removal.
MIT licensed. Current status: ~90 specimens, growing daily. Looking for contributors and feedback. Why PNGs specifically? They're the only widely-supported format with proper alpha transparency. SVGs don't work for photographic specimens. WebP support is still inconsistent. Code: https://github.com/chispainnov/specimen-gallery
Site: https://specimen.gallery Open to technical feedback – what would make this more useful/valuable? |