I kept running into the same problem: needing transparent PNGs of organisms (animals, plants, fungi) for design/education projects, but everything was either paywalled, had messy licensing, or required manual background removal.

Existing solutions: - Stock sites: $$$, restrictive licenses - Wikimedia Commons: mixed licensing, photos have backgrounds - PhyloPic: silhouettes only, not full specimens - iNaturalist: photos with backgrounds, not cutouts

So I built specimen.gallery – a searchable library of transparent specimen PNGs, all CC0 (public domain). Organized by scientific taxonomy. No accounts, no attribution required, just download and use.

Stack: Rails 8 + Postgres + Fly.io. Server-rendered, no React/Next.js, just clean HTML. Using Cloudinary for auto background removal. MIT licensed.

Current status: ~90 specimens, growing daily. Looking for contributors and feedback.

Why PNGs specifically? They're the only widely-supported format with proper alpha transparency. SVGs don't work for photographic specimens. WebP support is still inconsistent.

Code: https://github.com/chispainnov/specimen-gallery Site: https://specimen.gallery

Open to technical feedback – what would make this more useful/valuable?

A way to edit/improve tags for existing images would be useful. For example, the duck images could use a "Sex" tag.

And probably some kind of uploader account would be a good idea as well. So if somebody contacts you about an image they uploaded, you can verify if they were the original uploader. And you could give a user more rights related to editing metadata for images they uploaded.

Maybe the species + common name could be normalized instead of being free text fields. Especially if you find an existing database of species names.

Should bee wings be transparent? (Let the perfect be the enemy of good) You should have a source/url on the upload form of the image already exists somewhere.

https://specimen.gallery/taxa/43