No basemap — the tile source is not answering.
Records are still here and their coordinates are still right, but you
cannot see where they are.
Drop photographs to add them
Cairn reads each photograph's date and coordinate where it already sits. Nothing leaves this device during the sweep.
No upload until you chooseBecause that is a cairn: stones stacked deliberately, to mark a route or a place worth coming back to. Somebody piles them, and the next person along adds one. That is the whole idea of this system, and the icon is the name.
A lens, never a deed. It gives you a private working set over the ground inside it — your records there default to private, and you can see them together. It grants you nothing over anybody else's records, and it leaves no mark on public data.
Nobody owns a public record. A hundred overlapping claims can coexist because none of them is a claim of ownership, and nobody has to adjudicate between them.
Three tiers, per record, and you choose: public goes into the commons, shared is visible to people you name, private is yours alone. Separately, a precision dial decides how exactly the location is published.
The two are independent on purpose. A rare orchid can be public and fuzzed to a kilometre; a plant in your own front garden can be public at its true coordinate or not, as you decide. The database enforces this, not the app — there will be more than one app and they will not all remember.
It is converted to a JPEG about 2048 pixels on its long edge, which is what every screen shows. Everything the file knew — camera, lens, exposure, the coordinate, around 290 tags — is read out and stored with the record.
The full-size original is then deleted, once both the converted copy and that reading have been verified. That is a storage decision and it is a setting: it can be turned off, and then originals are kept from that point on. It cannot bring back one already deleted.
The photograph is not public because the record is. Files are served through a signed URL that checks what you are allowed to see.
That a model measured a distance — how near your photograph sits to the words for a plant, in a space where pictures and names are comparable. Nearest first.
It is not a claim about what your plant is, and Cairn will not record it as one. A model proposes; a person accepts. Until somebody says yes, the record has no name on it.
A suggestion is also drawn from the names encoded so far, which is not yet all of them, and the screen showing one says how many.
A flower, a leaf from both surfaces, fruit, bark, a twig, the whole plant, the ground it stands on. A herbarium sheet has carried roughly that set for two hundred years, because those are the parts that let a second person check the first person's identification.
None of it is required. A record with one photograph is a real record. The prompt is there because nobody regrets the extra frame later.
Because attaching to the wrong individual is worse than making a new record. Two plants can stand five metres apart. Cairn offers what is near and lets you decide; it never decides silently.