Walden

Walden is a field notebook for bird photography. It keeps track of where I walk, what I see, what I photograph and what the conditions were like, and then uses all that to answer the question I actually care about: where should I go, and when, if I want to photograph a particular bird? There’s an iPhone app for out in the field, a web journal for back home, and a server that talks to the bird databases.

I didn’t write my own GPS tracking from scratch. Walden is built on GeoPulse, an open-source location tracker, with the birding added on top. The phone app works without signal: everything saves on the phone and syncs when it can, and it can never create duplicates. If something’s only on the phone so far, it says “Saved on this iPhone”, not “Synced”, because I want to know exactly where my data is.

Everything keeps track of where it came from. Photos link to my Immich library, and each photo’s location says whether it came from the camera, the GPS track, or me. Weather is saved at the time. Species come from the official world bird list (11,227 of them, in English and Dutch).

Specs