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jakehockey10 / bird-compare

Compares bird sitings in different regions
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Provide space of images of birds in template. #8

Open jakehockey10 opened 9 years ago

jakehockey10 commented 9 years ago

Need lots of pictures of birds. It might depend on how many species are being compared to determine where the image appears. We could provide images in map-point pop ups, in the side-by-side comparisons, in a carousel, etc.?

We should add more comments to this when we get a better idea :)

jakehockey10 commented 9 years ago

I have started building popups for the markers for the birds that come in as the result of pushing the button at the bottom of the page. I'm having trouble getting the images, and quite frankly, it is kind of expensive trying to get them all every time the button is pushed. I think we need to some how store some of these images. Maybe we could have an upload route to our application that let us run updates through the nodemw node_module client in the birds.js file. We might want to bring mongodb into the mix. We wouldn't store the actual file, but the path to it.

Let me know if you have any other ideas?

Tahani2015 commented 9 years ago

Have you found a database for birds' photos? Or are they available in the ebird API ? I searched for that a lot, but couldn't find a good resource for all the ebird photos! Anyway, I guess having these photos displaying in one time would make our page too slow to load! Unless there is some concurrency technique by using threads with java script. For now, a hyperlink for each photo might be the appropriate solution!

rshamirza commented 9 years ago

For now, how about letting the user to choose a species name he wants to search for, then we can retrieve only pictures for that bird until we find a way to show all species pictures to users to search for

jakehockey10 commented 9 years ago

Both of those ideas are great ones. What I've tried so far is using the Wikipedia API to get the images from the articles of those birds. And the Wikipedia API npm module even had a batch call that we could use. I tried this because on the eBird API docs, someone put a comment on there about using the Wikipedia API to do just that. But then I tried it and all I got was the name of the image files (not the path, just the file name). I emailed the person that maintained this npm module and he rudely scoffed at me about expecting the actual image. I said I wanted to render those images on my website and he laughed at the idea of me wanting to do that and said that only the file names are returned (which does not make a bit of sense to me whatsoever).

I ran across an web app that someone else built that basically gave a link to a google image search of each bird. I agree that we could do something like that too, but I would much rather have the images on our site. Like you suggested, maybe we can start there. Then we can mention in our demo that that was something we wanted to get to.