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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 pa
by eclectic_mind05 7mo ago
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 https://github.com/chispainnov/specimen-gallery
Site: https://specimen.gallery https://specimen.gallery
Open to technical feedback – what would make this more useful/valuable?
- Aardwolf 7mo agoBonus points for pngs SEO-optimized for image searches with "transparent" that have a fake opaque grid on them
- eclectic_mind05 7mo agoGreat point about the transparency grid for image search SEO. Hadn't thought about that... Might add checkerboard thumbnails for search engines while keeping the downloads as pure transparent PNGs. Thanks!
- pastage 7mo agoThese look very nice thanks, hope it can be expanded. Interesting I wonder how does web devs handle transparency? There must be a better way than pngs.
- eclectic_mind05 7mo agoThanks! Yeah, expanding the collection is the priority right now. Re: transparency - PNGs are still the most universally supported. WebP has better compression but inconsistent support in design tools (Photoshop, Figma, etc.). SVGs don't work for photographic specimens. Could potentially offer WebP alongside PNG for modern browsers, but PNG is the safe default for now.