Species ID and Social Posts

The SPECIES IDENTIFICATION panel sits at the bottom of the Editor 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”. When you run Macro Studio in a supported language, common names come back in that language where the service has them, falling back to English otherwise.
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. This follows your app language too, so a German-language app opens the German Wikipedia article when one exists (and the English page when it doesn’t).

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.

Copying the result

The result text is selectable — drag across a name, the confidence figure, a taxonomy value or one of the other matches, and press Cmd+C (macOS) or Ctrl+C (Windows) to copy just that piece. The two reference links aren’t: they’re click-to-open, so a drag would fight the click.

To take the whole identification at once, click Copy in the SPECIES IDENTIFICATION header bar, or right-click anywhere in the panel and choose Copy species results. You get the common and scientific names, the confidence figure, the taxonomy, which service identified it, the iNaturalist and Wikipedia links, and the runner-up matches — as plain text, ready to paste into notes, an email, or a spreadsheet.

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.

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 → 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.

You can still get it out of the app: click Copy in the EXIF METADATA header bar (or right-click anywhere in the panel and choose Copy EXIF metadata) to put the whole block on your clipboard as plain Camera: ... lines. Individual values can also be selected with the mouse and copied with Cmd+C / Ctrl+C.

Privacy

When you press Identify species, Macro Studio sends the following to its identification service:

The stacked image.
The kingdom you picked.
The GPS coordinates and capture date/time from your EXIF, when your camera recorded them.
The app’s language code (for example de, or fil for Filipino), so results can come back in your language — just the short interface-language code, never your system locale or any other setting.

The coordinates and capture date are there to improve accuracy: they’re forwarded to the upstream classifier for species identifications, where location and season genuinely disambiguate species (the flowering and fruiting forms of the same plant, for example). The language code selects the language of the common names and Wikipedia link that come back; the service falls back to English for languages it doesn’t cover.

Your other source frames are never sent, and the result is cached locally in your Macro Studio project.

If you’d rather not send location data, strip GPS from your files before identifying, or skip the panel entirely — the rest of Macro Studio works fully offline. The EXIF metadata panel above the controls shows you exactly which coordinates your files carry.

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.