Naturtag#
Summary#
Naturtag is a tool for nature photographers that adds useful metadata to describe the organisms in your photos. It includes a desktop application, a command-line interface, and can also be used as a python library. It is mainly intended for use with iNaturalist, but can also be used independently.
Naturtag gathers complete observation metadata (for iNaturalist observation photos), or just taxonomy metadata (for everything else). It then embeds this information in your local photo collection using XMP and EXIF metadata.
Use Cases#
This image metadata has a variety of uses, including:
Local photo organization#
Naturtag can tag your photos with hierarchical keywords (aka structured keywords), which are supported by some photo viewers/editors like Lightroom, FastPictureViewer, Photo Mechanic, digiKam, and XnViewMP.
This basically gives you a taxonomic tree for browsing and filtering your photos.
Example in XnView
Photo hosting#
Naturtag can also simplify tagging photos for photo hosting sites like Flickr. For that use case, this tool generates semi-structured keywords in the same format as iNaturalist’s Flickr Tagger.
Example search using these tags: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/taxonomy:class=arachnida
Example of taxonomy tags on Flickr
Other biodiversity tools#
Finally, naturtag can improve interoperability with other tools and systems that interact with biodiversity data. For example, in addition to iNaturalist you might submit some observations to another platform with a more specific focus, such as eBird, BugGuide, or Mushroom Observer. For that use case, this tool supports Simple Darwin Core.
Installation#
See GitHub Releases for downloads and Installation for platform-specific instructions.
To just install naturtag as a python package, run:
pip install naturtag
Usage#
GUI#
The main interface for this project is still a work in progress.
It includes an interface for selecting and tagging images:
And tools to search and browse species to tag your images with:
See Application Guide for more details.
CLI#
Naturtag also includes a command-line interface. It takes an observation or species, plus some image
files, and generates EXIF and XMP metadata to write to those images. You can see it in action here:
See CLI documentation for more details.
Library#
You can also import naturtag as a python library, and use its main features in your own scripts or
applications. Basic example:
from naturtag import tag_images, refresh_tags
# Tag images with full observation metadata
tag_images(['img1.jpg', 'img2.jpg'], observation_id=1234)
# Refresh previously tagged images with latest observation and taxonomy metadata
refresh_tags(['~/observations/'], recursive=True)
See API Reference for more details.
Development Status#
See Issues for planned features and current progress.
If you have any problems, suggestions, or questions about naturtag, you can:
Ping me (@jcook) on the iNaturalist Community Forum.
When I’m not working on this, I’m often working on other libraries that naturtag benefits from, including pyinaturalist, pyinaturalist-convert, and requests-cache.