Faunary helps you rediscover them.
Point it at a folder of photos. Faunary rebuilds your encounters and surfaces what runs through them: the places you returned to, the species that marked a season, the shape of a life in the field. It's an ecological memory you can explore, not storage you scroll past.
Faunary runs best on a desktop for now. A mobile field companion is in the works.
Not a Lightroom replacement · Not a social network · A wildlife memory companion
See it
The encounter, not the file, is the unit of meaning.
Faunary isn't a catalogue of species. It's a record of your encounters with them: the morning, the place, the weather, the behavior, and the frames that came of it. That one idea is what separates it from a photo library or a sightings list.
Every surface below is live in that demo. Go click around.
What we keep losing
You come back from a season with thousands of frames and a handful of stories you can still tell. The frames last. The stories fade by the next trip: why you were there, what the weather was doing, the behavior that made the shot.
How it works
The reconstruction is deterministic, not a guess. It reads the metadata your camera already wrote, so it's fast, private, and you can see why it grouped what it did.
Drop in a folder. Faunary reads the EXIF your camera already wrote: the time, the place, the camera, the bursts you fired.
Those frames get grouped back into the outings and encounters they came from. A wetland morning becomes one entry, not 240 files.
Walk your archive as a graph, a timeline of eras, a map, and a feed of what it noticed while you weren't looking.
The system
Every one of these is built and clickable in the demo today. Nothing here is a roadmap promise.
01 · Where it starts
Live in the demoPoint it at a folder of photos. It hands back the days you spent taking them.
Faunary reads the times, places, and bursts already sitting in your files and rebuilds them into outings and encounters: a wetland morning, a week on the coast, all before you've named or edited a thing. There's no tagging marathon to sit through. The work you already did in the field is what it runs on.
02 · The unit of memory
Live in the demoAn encounter isn't a file or a folder. It's the morning itself, and everything that surrounded it.
Each sighting becomes an encounter that holds the species you saw, where you stood, the weather and light, the behavior worth remembering, and the frames that came of it. The photos hang from the moment, not the other way around.
03 · Relationships
Live in the demoThe connections a folder tree could never show you.
Species sit near the habitats they favor, while weather and season pull on them from the edges. Drag a node and follow a thread, and the wetland species gather into one cluster. It's your archive drawn as an ecosystem instead of a list.
04 · What it notices
Live in the demoThe archive reads itself and tells you what changed.
It isn't another wall of counts. Faunary surfaces things worth knowing: a wetland you haven't worked in over a year that still pulls you back, a species gone quiet past its usual gap, a companion bird missing from your recent mornings. You can ask it in plain language too, like "foggy-morning herons" or "everything from the Farnes."
05 · The long view
Live in the demoYears of fieldwork, read back to you as chapters.
Faunary finds the shape in a long archive and names it: the forest years, the wetland obsession, the season you started traveling for birds. Slide a window across time and the matching encounters light up. Open any one and step back inside it.
06 · Place
Live in the demoEvery site you've worked, and what each one gave back.
Pins and soft glows mark where your encounters happened, each sized by how much that place produced. Click a location and the trip reassembles: the light, the weather, the order you found things in. Sensitive sites stay blurred to a region instead of a pin.
Why it's built this way
Most software optimizes for getting things done. This one optimizes for attention, patience, and the long relationship between a photographer and a place.
Calm and unhurried. It should feel like a field journal you want to open, not another tool to keep on top of.
The encounter is the unit, not the file. What you remember about a morning matters more than where the RAW ended up.
Species, places, weather, and behavior link through a living graph. They're there to follow, not buried six folders deep.
Sensitive locations blur on their own. Breeding seasons raise a quiet flag before you share, not after.
The archive knows more the longer you keep at it. Year ten is worth far more than year one.
The ethical wildlife layer
Sensitive species get flagged. Nesting sites blur to a region on their own. During vulnerable seasons, a quiet prompt asks before you share. You decide how each one is published: public, approximate, private, or held back, one encounter at a time.
Vulnerable species show as a region, never an exact pin.
A gentle nudge during nesting and breeding.
Private, approximate, or delayed, set per encounter.
Where it fits
Faunary isn't a photo editor, an asset manager, or a species checklist. It's an ecological memory: the record of your encounters, and everything they connect to.
Your data
Export everything you've logged (encounters, notes, photos) as a single download, any time you want. Reconstruction and field intelligence run on your archive, and the archive stays yours.
One download, no lock-in.
A personal archive, not a public database.
Field beta
Point Faunary at a folder of photos and it rebuilds your encounters into a living archive — the places, species, and seasons that shaped your years in the field. It's early, and built in the open with the photographers using it, so expect the odd rough edge.