A Taxonomy of European Birds

Looking through my photo collection, I see that I have taken over 1,300 photos that have a bird or birds as the subject. Up until now, I’ve catalogued these in a rather haphazard fashion, that’s to say that as I’ve photographed a new bird (for example a Green Woodpecker), I’ve added its common name to the list of keywords in my catalogue. As the list has grown, I’ve also tried to group the bird species a bit e.g. put the birds of prey together, or waterbirds together. So I’ve ended up with a rather messy taxonomy of birds.

Then, a few days ago, I noticed that someone had posted a message in the Controlled Vocabulary group to say that he’d put together a list of keywords for Adobe’s Lightroom that followed the taxonomy of the list of Western Paleartic Birds produced by the Association of European Records and Rarities Committees, the AERC. As an aside, I note that whoever is responsible for the AERC web site needs to fix the missing or broken links that pepper it.

Anyway, Rudi Theunis made his keywords list available to the members of the Controlled Vocabulary group, and I grabbed a copy to see if I could use it with IDimager, the program that I use to catalogue my photos. (Note: IDimager is no longer available. Its successor is Photo Supreme, which I am now using) It turns out that IDimager can easily import Lightroom keyword lists with one click, so I’ve now got a complete taxonomy of European Birds set up, with both common names and the scientific names as synonyms. See the following screenshot showing a partial view of the taxonomy (click on the image to see the full size screenshot in a new window).

I spent a few hours re-cataloguing my bird photos, and now they are all nicely fitted into the new taxonomy, thanks to Mr. Theunis.