Species ID and Social Posts

The SPECIES IDENTIFICATION panel sits at the bottom of the Develop sidebar. It shows EXIF metadata, runs an AI-assisted species lookup, and offers a Draft Social Post button that builds a caption pre-loaded with the species name and your custom tags.

This is an optional workflow — none of it is required to stack or save. If you don’t shoot wildlife and don’t post to social, you can ignore the panel entirely.

Identifying a species

Click the Identify species button (or whichever label appears in your build). A small kingdom picker dialog opens first:

• Plant
• Insect
• Mushroom

The kingdom narrows the search — picking “Insect” makes the lookup skip plant and fungi candidates, which speeds up the result and improves accuracy.

Once you pick a kingdom, Macro Studio sends the stacked image to an online species identification service. The panel updates within a few seconds with:

• Common name — e.g. “Eastern Bumble Bee”.
• Scientific name — e.g. Bombus impatiens.
• Taxonomy chain — kingdom → order → family → genus.
• Confidence indicator — when the match is uncertain.
• Wikipedia link — opens the species page on Wikipedia in your browser for verification.

The result is cached per image, so re-opening this image later shows the same identification without re-querying. You can re-run identification with a different kingdom if the first result looks wrong.

How accuracy works

Species ID is best at:

• Common North American and European species.
• Distinct, recognizable subjects (a bumble bee vs. a honey bee, both very different).
• Images where the Subject mask cleanly isolates the organism.

It’s weaker on:

• Highly similar species (different bumble bee species with similar coloration).
• Subjects partly hidden by foliage or shot from unusual angles.
• Very localized species not well-represented in the training data.

Always sanity-check via the Wikipedia link before captioning. The identification is a suggestion, not a guarantee.

Drafting a social post

Once a species is identified (or even when it isn’t), click Draft Social Post. A dialog opens with a pre-built caption that includes:

• The common name as the title.
• The scientific name.
• Your custom social tags (configured in Preferences — see below).
• Suggested hashtags relevant to the kingdom and the location data from your EXIF.

You can edit the caption inside the dialog before copying it to your clipboard. The image itself isn’t posted from Macro Studio — this just generates the text. Paste it into your Instagram, Facebook, or wherever you share work.

Customizing your tags

Open Preferences → Customize Social Post Tags… to define the hashtags and signature lines that should appear in every draft post. Common patterns:

• Your photographer handle (@yourhandle)
• A signature hashtag for your account (#yourname_macro)
• Equipment hashtags (#sigma105 #godoxv1)
• Subject-specific hashtags layered with the auto-generated ones.

The customizer has a few different categories so you can scope tags by kingdom (insect-only tags only appear when the subject is an insect).

EXIF metadata panel

Above the species ID controls, the panel shows the camera-side metadata Macro Studio extracted from the source frames:

• Camera body
• Lens
• Focal length, aperture, shutter speed, ISO
• Date and time of capture
• GPS coordinates if your camera embedded them

This is read-only — the metadata is informational, not editable. It does feed into the social-post draft (location and capture date), so check it before drafting if you want to scrub or include those.

Privacy

A note: when you press Identify species, the stacked image is sent to an online identification service. Nothing else (no GPS, no EXIF, no other frames) is transmitted. The result is cached locally in your Macro Studio project; no other user data leaves your machine.

If you’d rather not use species ID at all, skip the panel — the rest of Macro Studio works fully offline.

Tips

• Pick the right kingdom. Even a clear bee photo can return weird results if you accidentally picked “Plant” — the lookup commits to that kingdom and works within it.
• Verify via Wikipedia. The link is right there; click it. Compare the species page’s photos against yours before captioning.
• Customize your tags once. Set up your social-post template in Preferences early and forget about it — every draft will use it from then on.

See also

• Saving — write the image to disk for sharing.
• Preferences — find the Customize Social Post Tags button.