About Specimen Gallery

Specimen Gallery is an open collection of high-quality, transparent-background specimen images. It exists to provide illustrators, designers, researchers, and builders with clean cutouts for visual reference, diagrams, and creative work — with licensing that stays simple and reusable.

How uploads work

  1. 1 Upload a specimen image (PNG, WebP, or JPG/HEIC with background removal)
  2. 2 Add a display name (what people should see) — scientific/taxonomic name is optional and helps classification
  3. 3 Optionally enable automatic background removal to generate a transparent PNG
  4. 4 If the name is recognized, your specimen goes live immediately — otherwise it's queued for review
  5. 5 Community members can confirm or suggest IDs to help verify specimens

Tips for a great upload

Specimen Gallery uses Cloudinary's background removal API to automatically cut the specimen out of your photo. The cutout is only as good as the photo it works from — the clearer the input, the cleaner the result.

For the best result, the specimen should be:

  • • Photographed clearly and in focus
  • • Isolated as much as possible — ideally against a plain, contrasting background
  • • Fully in frame, with no important parts cropped at the edges

Try to avoid:

  • • Busy backgrounds that visually blend into the specimen
  • • Hard shadows overlapping or merging with the specimen's outline
  • • Partial, blurred, or heavily cropped specimens

Licensing

All images are released under CC0 (Public Domain) — free to use by anyone, for any purpose, no attribution required. This keeps the collection maximally open and reusable.

Quality guidelines

  • • Clean cutout with minimal artifacts or background remnants
  • • Accurate labeling when known — uncertain IDs may be flagged for review
  • • Only upload work you own or have rights to release as public domain
  • • No sensitive, illegal, or inappropriate content

Identification accuracy

Specimen identifications on this site are community-contributed and may not always be correct. Names are provided by uploaders and verified through community consensus — not by professional taxonomists.

Every specimen page has a built-in verification system where visitors can confirm the current ID or suggest a correction. If you spot a misidentified specimen, please use the suggestion tool on its page to help improve accuracy.

Do not rely on identifications here for safety-critical decisions (e.g., edibility of wild species). When in doubt, consult a qualified expert.

Questions? See our Terms or contact us.