This feature shows a thumbnail gallery of maximum 20, randomly selected images referenced in the occurrences of a dataset. Clicking an image opens the corresponding occurrence page. It gives users a very intuitive, visual preview of what a dataset is about and the type of images it contains, e.g. scans of herbarium specimens, microscopic photos, specimen drawings, or amateur photos of wildlife observations.
Just as the multimedia bar, this functionality makes use of the multimedia extension in GBIF downloads, which contains all related multimedia, even those originally provided in associatedMedia. The images are randomly selected from the extension when processing the metrics, but 1) only multimedia of the type StillImage and 2) only one image per occurrence is considered, with a maximum of 20 images per dataset.
- Consider images provided in
associatedMedia(available in the extension asno type). Unfortunately, many URLs provided viaassociatedMediareference a webpage containing the image, rather than the image file itself, and can thus not be embedded. A potentially more robust way to assess if the URL is actually referencing an image would be to detect the MIME type. - Support previews of other multimedia types, such as sounds and videos.
- Add a page where users can browse and filter all images or all multimedia of a dataset.
- Create thumbnails for referenced images. That way, verification of the MIME type could be done beforehand and the lower file size would allow faster rendering of image previews.