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This page gives tips on assembling data for the Anki fish species ID flashcards.

Data collection for the fish Species ID flashcards

To extract text from the Barefoot Conservation .pdf files I copied & pasted the contents of each .pdf page into SumatraPDF reader, and then cleaned it up in Windows Notepad.

Scientific binomial names uniquely identify each species within Animalia, and are practically unique across Kingdoms, so a binomial name is the obvious choice for uniquely identifying a species record or uniquely identifying a speciesphoto collection.

Anki has all its photos for all its decks stored in the one combined Collections Folder, so it helps to have consistent filenames that allow you to find photos for your fish deck amongst all your other decks - doing so assists backups, batch-resizing, and corrections). So each Fish Species ID photo starts with SPID_ ('Species ID') and almost ends with _LKJH (a nonsense string that is hopefully unique). Column B of the spreadsheet generates photo filenames such as SPID_Chaetodon_baronessa_LKJH_, which makes it easy to save photos as, e.g., SPID_Chaetodon_baronessa_LKJH_3.jpg. (E.g.: copy SPID_Chaetodon_baronessa_LKJH_ into your clipboard with a Ctrl+C; right-click the photo you want to save and click Save As; into the filename field paste your clipboard with a Ctrl+V and type '3' and then hit Enter (which will usually save it as .jpg; if not use Irfanview as described below).

To manually extract photos from .pdf files I found it most convenient to open the .pdf files in LibreOffice Draw, and save them by right-clicking on each photo.

To get photos from Wikipedia and Google Images etc I simply saved them by right-clicking. If in doubt re resolution, I chose a larger version; I later used Irfanview (very nice freeware) in a batch run resize any .jpg. .png, or .gif to a .jpg with a largest dimension of 400 pixels or less.

An Irfanview batch conversion defaults to saving as .jpg, which was a convenient way of dealing with various .png and .gif files - I specified .jpg filenames in the spreadsheet, and the Irfanview batch run made this true without me having to convert .PNGs and .GIFs when individually downloading them.

You can move the photos into Anki's Collection Folder before or after you have imported the spreadsheet details into the deck. Importing using my spreadsheet means the filenames are chosen at import time; if the actual file is not in the Collections Folder then a placeholder will appear on the flashcard.

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