Add pictures to recordings and manually upload bird recordings

A new software release adds a couple more requested features:

• the ability to add pictures to recordings, and
• the ability to manually upload bird recordings.

Adding pictures to thermal video recordings

It can often be difficult to understand exactly what you're looking at when viewing a thermal video. To help with this, many of our customers take pictures of the setup, but it can be a little cumbersome remembering which picture is associated with which videos. This gets even harder if a camera is being moved around different locations. We now have a nice solution to this. We give the different locations names, and then we allow you to upload an image for each location that can easily be accessed from the videos and audio recordings page.

Location names

We call the locations of the camera and bird monitors stations. Each time a recording is uploaded it is assigned to an existing station if its GPS location is with 30m that station. Otherwise we assign it a new station name.

In the example below the automatically generated station name is "New station for Thermal 137_2022_05_23T8:42:31:387Z". This contains the name of the camera and the date and time the station was created. The station name is shown with each recording.

The station name can be changed by going to the groups page (PFBP in the example above), clicking on the stations tab and then clicking the rename button.

To add a picture to a station: click on the station name, click on the Reference photo tab and select a photo to upload.

When you're review a recording from either a thermal camera or a bird monitor you can access the photo by clicking on the  symbol.

This video demonstrates adding a photo to a thermal camera station.

Manually uploading bird recordings

Another feature customers have asked us for is the ability to manually upload bird recordings. This is useful when you have a remote bird monitor with no internet connection and an SD card. At the moment you have to retrieve the bird monitor and bring it back into somewhere with internet connection, and then upload the recordings from the phone. You then have to return the bird monitor. This means two trips and potentially a period when no recordings are being made.

With the new release you can swap out the SD card for another one when you visit the remote bird monitor and then upload the recordings from the SD card to the Cacophony portal. To do this, go to the group page for your bird monitor, select the Manual uploads tab, select the bird recording files you want to upload, select the device that these recordings belong to and then press upload recordings.

Note at the moment you can only upload recordings that have been made on Cacophony Bird Monitors. We intend to expand this to be able to upload recordings from any device in the future.