Daily Use

Once the camera is connected and the wizard is done, BirdWatchAI mostly minds itself. This Part is a tour of the things you'll click most often: the dashboard, the detection history, the gallery and slideshow, the statistics page, and the community feed.

The dashboard / main window

Desktop main window

The desktop window opens at 1400×800 by default. From top to bottom:

Top status bar

A single bold status line, e.g. Status: 🔍 Monitoring (Detections: 12). It changes to reflect the current state — Connecting, Night Mode (outside daylight hours), Paused, Reconnecting — and always appends the current motion percentage.

The button bar

A row of action buttons (it wraps to fit the window):

System tray

• Double-click the tray icon to restore the window.
• Hover to see a tooltip: camera name, monitoring status, camera status, and detections today.
• Right-click for a menu: Show/Hide Window, Start/Stop Monitoring, Settings, 🔄 Restart Camera, Exit.
• When the window is minimized, a detection shows a tray balloon: "🐦 <Bird> Detected!" with confidence and time.

Server web dashboard

The server dashboard at http://<host>:8080 is a single-page Blazor app. The top of the home page shows:

• Engine status card — Monitoring (Running / Stopped), Camera (Connected / Disconnected), Detections today, App version, and the ⬆ Update available button when a newer release has been published.
• Live snapshot — a thumbnail of the most recent camera frame (refreshes every few seconds).
• Recent detections — the last 10 sightings with thumbnail, species, time, and rarity.

The left-hand nav links to the other pages: History, Gallery, Stats, Logs, Settings.

Starting & stopping monitoring

After connecting, click Start Monitoring (desktop) or toggle the engine on the Engine status card (server). The state changes to 🔍 Monitoring and the app watches for motion every couple of seconds.

Several automatic guardrails govern monitoring:

• Daylight only (default on, 7:00–20:00): outside these hours the status shows 🌙 Night Mode and detections pause. Adjust or disable in Settings → Monitoring.
• Cooldown (default 3 s): minimum gap between detections, to avoid bursts.
• Daily limit (default 500): caps snapshots per day.
• Auto-connect on startup (optional): the app can connect and begin monitoring by itself when launched.

Detection history

The detection history is your searchable journal of every bird that's visited.

Desktop

The right-hand Bird Detections table. The header shows how many rows match your filters out of the total in the database. Columns: Date/Time, Bird Species, Confidence, Temp, Rarity (🟢 Common · 🟡 Uncommon · 🟠 Rare · 🔴 Very Rare), ⭐ favorite, 🎬 video, ⚠️ uncertain.

Click any column header to sort. Click a row to load its captured image (left) and a matching Wikipedia species photo (right). Double-click a row to open it in the slideshow viewer.

Filtering

The filter row above the grid lets you narrow by species (partial text), a From / To date range, a confidence range, rarity, and toggles for ⭐ favorites only and ⚠️ uncertain only. Clear resets; 🔄 refreshes from the database; ▶️ launches a slideshow of the filtered results.

Right-click actions

Right-click one or more rows for a rich context menu: Open Image, 🎬 Play Video, folder shortcuts, Google Image Search, Reverse Image Search, ⭐ Toggle Favorite, ✅ Confirm Detection (for uncertain), Correct Identification…, 🌐 Push to Community…, 🖼 Send to Photo Frame, Delete Selected Row(s), 📤 Export Detections (CSV / JSON).

Server

The History page is a paginated table with the same columns and the same filter set: species, date range, confidence range, rarity, favorites, uncertain. Click a row to expand the snapshot inline; click the species name to jump to the Gallery filtered to that species. The same right-click actions are available via a row-end ⋯ menu.

Gallery & slideshow

The Gallery groups detections by species — one tile per bird, sized by recency — and clicking a tile launches a fullscreen slideshow of just that species. The slideshow has fade / slide / Ken Burns / blur transitions, a configurable timer, keyboard navigation (arrows, Space to pause, F for fullscreen, Esc to close), and a shuffle / loop toggle.

On the desktop, the same slideshow is available as a standalone window — open via double-click, the filter ▶️ button, or the right-click menu. It's a full media viewer for your bird photos and videos with previous / play-pause / next, fullscreen, shuffle, loop, frame-step, speed control, a media-type filter (All / Photos / Videos), Ken Burns on photos, info overlay (species / time), and keyboard control.

Statistics

The Statistics page analyzes your entire detection history (not just what's visible in the grid).

The summary panel shows total detections, unique species, most common species, date range, rare species count, and your current daily streak. Below that, an interactive chart suite:

• Trend — detections per day, stacked by species. Hovering a point shows the per-species breakdown for that day.
• Diurnal pattern — hour-of-day activity, tintable by a selected species.
• Day of week / hour heatmap — when birds visit, across the week.
• Rarity mix — one bar per rarity, with the species breakdown inside each bar.
• Top species, Life list, Pairs (species that show up together), Records (highest confidence of each species), Arrivals & dormant.
• Weather correlation — temperature bars colored by species.

Each species has a stable color picked once per page load, and that swatch follows the species across every chart and list — so a bird's color reads as its identity on the page.

The community site

The home page at www.birdwatchai.com is both a showcase and a live community window. Notable sections:

• Live Detection Ticker — a scrolling banner of the most recent sightings.
• Detection Hotspots — a map of recent detections, with rare-bird hotspots highlighted.
• Live From the Community — a gallery of the latest sighting photos.
• On This Day Last Year and This Week's Highlights — fun retrospectives and KPIs.
• Migration Pulse — the month's most-detected species.

The big 🔴 Live Community Feed link opens the full interactive community app (community.html) with Feed, Map, Gallery, Stats, and Feeders views.

Signing in

Creating a community account is free and passwordless:

1. On the community feed page, click Sign In.
2. Enter your email and click Send Magic Link.
3. Open the email and click the link; you'll be returned to the feed, signed in. Your session persists across visits.
4. Open Profile to set a Display Name and a short Bio.

Signing in unlocks ❤️ likes, 💬 comments (with one level of replies), ☆ following feeders (with optional rare-bird notifications), and your Life List (your personal list of species seen, shareable as a read-only link).

The embeddable widget

You can embed a tiny live bird feed on your own website using an iframe snippet (copy it from the site's "Embed Live Birds on Your Site" section). It supports parameters to filter to a specific feeder, limit how many detections show (max 20), and set a custom title; it refreshes itself periodically.

The community screensaver

A free companion Windows screensaver (downloadable from the home page) turns your idle screens into a live community bird gallery — one independent slideshow per monitor, pulling fresh sightings every few minutes. Install with the included install.bat (no admin needed); configure the transition effect, photo duration, photo order, and whether to show species names.

Installing the site as an app (PWA)

The community site is a Progressive Web App, so you can install it like a native app:

• Desktop (Chrome/Edge): click the install icon in the address bar.
• iPhone/iPad (Safari): Share → Add to Home Screen.
• Android (Chrome): menu → Install app.