Watch: tagging a selection with a species — 34 seconds, no sound.

Every wildlife photographer’s library starts the same way: a folder per trip, and then, a few thousand frames later, a folder per species. Bald Eagle, Black Bear, Harlequin Duck. It feels like order. It works right up until it doesn’t — the first frame with two species in it, the first name a taxonomist changes, the first researcher who asks for Histrionicus histrionicus.

Archyv is a Mac app that puts the species inside the photo instead of in the folder name. Select every frame of the same subject, search once by common or scientific name, and it writes the keywords and the full Darwin Core hierarchy to all of them in one pass, from a taxonomy bundled in the app, entirely offline. Below: why species folders fail, what to record in the file instead, how a season’s shoot is tagged, how to find photos by species, family or sighting afterwards — and how to hand a tagged file to iNaturalist, GBIF or an NGO.

Where species folders break

One frame, two species. The heron with the fish. The eagle stealing from the osprey. The frame goes in one folder or the other, and the other species vanishes from your archive. Duplicating the file into both folders is the usual fix, and it is how a library ends up with three copies of everything and no idea which one has the edits.

Names change. Taxonomists split and merge species constantly, and common names drift by region — the bird you filed under one name in 2019 may be two species now, or one of them may have been renamed. A folder name is a fixed label on a moving target.

The folder only answers one question. “Every photo of a Bald Eagle” is easy. “Every raptor,” “every bird photographed in May,” “every juvenile” — those cut across folders, and a folder tree can only be cut one way.

Nobody else can read it. A folder called Harlequin Duck means something to you. It means nothing to a stock agency, a conservation NGO’s database, or a researcher who asks for your photos of Histrionicus histrionicus. The moment a photo leaves your drive, the folder name stays behind.

Record the species in the file, not the path

The fix is to put the species inside the photo’s metadata, where it travels with the file, survives any reorganisation, and can be read by any tool that understands the standard.

Two kinds of metadata do this job, and they are complementary.

Keywords are the everyday layer. A species name in the Keywords field is what Lightroom, Bridge, Photo Mechanic, Finder and every stock platform search on. Put the common name and the scientific name both in, and the photo is findable by either.

Darwin Core is the scientific layer. It is the standard used by iNaturalist, GBIF, eBird and museum collections for describing a biological observation, and it stores the species as a structured hierarchy — Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species — plus the naming authority and rank, in separate, named fields. That structure is what lets you search for “every member of the family Accipitridae” rather than remembering each species in it, and it is what a scientist or NGO can import directly instead of retyping.

Written into the file, both layers survive a rename, a move to a new drive and a change of cataloguing software. A folder tree survives none of those.

Tagging a season’s shoot in one pass

The reason most people don’t do this is the typing. Fourteen fields of taxonomy, correctly spelled, on every frame, is not a realistic ask after a long day in the field.

In Archyv the process is Species Tagging, and it works on a selection rather than a single file. You select every frame of the same subject — a morning’s worth of the same otter family, say — search for the species once by common or scientific name, and Archyv writes the full Darwin Core hierarchy and the keywords to all of them in one run.

The species list is the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, bundled inside the app, so the names, hierarchy and authorship are the ones the scientific databases actually use, and the whole thing runs offline. A small hand-curated layer on top fixes the common names and well-known subspecies that the raw catalogue omits or names oddly, so a search for the name a photographer would use finds the right entry.

Two settings worth deciding once:

Which text fields get the keyword-style tags. Keywords is the important one; Caption, Title and Headline are optional. Keywords defaults to Append, so a species tag lands on top of your existing keywords rather than replacing them.
How much Darwin Core to write. Every field, or only the ones you care about. The choice is remembered, so the second run is two clicks.

Each run tags one species. Different subjects mean different runs — which is exactly how you would sort them in your head anyway.

Where the tag ends up, by file type

RAW files from most cameras cannot be written to safely, so for those the tags go into an XMP sidecar — a small companion file with the same name beside the photo, which Lightroom, Bridge and Capture One all read. DNG files can hold the metadata internally and are written directly. Archyv picks the right place for each format automatically; if you shoot RAW and JPEG together, this guide on RAW–JPEG pairs and sidecars explains how to keep the pair in step.

Finding photos by species, family or sighting

Once the species is in the file, the folder structure stops mattering, because you can select on the metadata instead.

Archyv’s Find Existing process reads the Darwin Core fields and the keywords directly, so “every file tagged with this species,” “everything in this family,” or “every frame recorded as juvenile” becomes a filter you apply to a folder — and the selection it produces feeds straight into the next process, whether that is renaming, converting for the web, or writing your copyright.

This is where the structured fields pay off. The observation-level Darwin Core fields — Life Stage, Sex, Vitality, Reproductive Condition — can be set in the Metadata Editor and filtered on later. Recording “juvenile” once, on the day, is how you find every juvenile you have ever photographed years afterwards.

If you still want folders by species

You may still want a species-per-folder view for delivery, or simply for browsing in Finder. The difference is that now the folders can be derived from the metadata rather than being the metadata.

File Transfer can organise into folders by keyword, so a copy of the library sorted by species is a template choice, not a manual job — and because it is built from the tags, it can be rebuilt any time, into any structure. The sort-into-folders guide covers the mechanics; substitute the keyword axis for the date axis and it is the same run.

The order of operations matters: tag first, then build folders from the tags. Not the other way round.

A file that carries its Darwin Core fields is ready to hand over. The scientific name, rank and hierarchy are in the standard fields the receiving side expects, so a batch of photos becomes a batch of observations without a spreadsheet in between. Add the location and date — the camera has already written the date, and the Metadata Editor handles location — and the file is a complete record of where, when and what.

One caution that applies to any wildlife archive: check what location data you are sharing before you share it. For sensitive species, a precise GPS coordinate in a public upload is a problem. The same Metadata Editor that writes location can remove it from a delivery copy.

Next: the Species Tagging reference covers every field and option. If the filenames should carry the species too, rename from camera metadata using a keyword variable so the name and the tag agree.