Fantastic Birds and Where to Find Them

A product eight months ahead of its time, as foretold by xkcd.

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Inspiration

The project was inspired by 'xkcd 1425: Tasks' (http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tasks.png) by Randall Munroe, which claims that it would take a research team working around the clock for five years to build an app that did two things: check a photo's geotags to see if it was taken inside a National Park, and determine if the photo was of a bird. That comic came out on September 24, 2012, and four years, two months and nine days later, his app idea has come to life!

What it does

The site checks flickr for photos taken within a National Park of the user's choosing ![so long as the user chooses Everglades National Park] and sends whatever it can find to Clarifai, which processes the photos using a custom model that was trained to find birds. Photos that fit the model are passed back to the site and displaye in a stylish manner that allows the user to view each photo individually, along with the place within the park where the photo was taken and the creator's information

How I built it

I built it in Atom, and sketched it out on the whiteboard. I made the product in JSBin.

Challenges I ran into

Time. I was also "organizing" a Local Hack Day at my school, Eckerd College, and so I didn't have too much time to work on the project and learn everything I needed to know in order to build it.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Completing and shipping out a hack successfully for the first time.

What I learned

I learned how to use an API!

What's next for Fantastic Birds and Where to Find Them

The ability to choose from more than one park! And the ability to actually search more than one set of coordinates from within a park, in order to reflect the true extent of photos taken in our National Parks.

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