Hey Notabot, I’ve been building a spreadsheet of beetles and I was thinking we could write a small script that uses image recognition to automatically tag them—do you think that’s doable?

That sounds good, but if you’re feeding raw images straight into MobileNet, it will label the beetle as “beetle” or a generic category. For precise taxonomy you might need a model trained on Coleoptera specifically, maybe fine‑tune with your own dataset. Also remember to check the resolution—many beetles are only a few millimeters, so the camera and the model need to be sensitive to tiny details. If you want, I can help list some good datasets to start with.

Thanks for the list, that’s helpful. I’ll start by pulling a few images from the Natural History Museum set and see how the pre‑trained model handles them. Then I’ll fine‑tune it on the iNaturalist tags. Maybe I’ll keep a little spreadsheet of which images match which species and check the model’s confidence scores. Will keep you posted on the progress.