Scythebill 19.0: eBird 2025 and automatic photo to species entry

Scythebill 19.0.0 is now available. It's got the brand new eBird/Clements 2025 taxonomy, and a new way to add a bunch of photos in one step, automatically assigning them to species.

As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

eBird/Clements 2025 taxonomy

The headline for most users will be the new taxonomy. All the details on that taxonomy are nicely wrapped up on the eBird site in an article which includes a nice summary table. This update gets eBird very close to the AviList taxonomy, though in a handful of cases ahead of it.

As always, Scythebill will handle a large majority of taxonomic changes automatically for you. If you want to know how it affected your list, visit the Spits and Lumps special report:

I was "lucky" to avoid the big lumps in New Guinea and the southern oceans.

Automatic photo to species entry

This one might be big for the photographers out there!

If you've entered a lot of sightings with photographs in the past, you've had to drag each photo, one-by-one, to the correct species. This was tedious and error-prone. But if you've labeled photos with species names already in Lightroom, ON1 Photo RAW, or any other image editor, you can now handle that all in one step. A video will explain better than words:

Just drop the photos on the new region at the bottom-right of the species entry page, and all the photos will be examined and automatically assigned to species, adding species if necessary. You can drop hundreds of photos in one step.

This isn't using Merlin or any AI to identify the photos. Scythebill just looks at the file name and the text of any description you added (EXIF or IPTC tags, for those who know these things), and sees if it can find species names. (If you don't do that work already in your photo editor, then this won't save you time.)

Any time Scythebill can't find a species name, it'll leave a photo behind in the drop box. You can manually drag it onto the correct species, or leave it unassigned and have it added to the visit or trip.

Visit photos

Scythebill has supported attaching photos to individual sightings, and attaching links to trips. Now, you can add photos to a visit. If you took photos of the crowd at a giant twitch, or habitat shots, or anything else you'd like to remember, you can add those.