I kept running into the same problem: needing transparent PNGs of organisms (animals, plants, fungi) for design/education projects, but everything was either paywalled, had messy licensing, or required manual background removal.

Existing solutions: - Stock sites: $$$, restrictive licenses - Wikimedia Commons: mixed licensing, photos have backgrounds - PhyloPic: silhouettes only, not full specimens - iNaturalist: photos with backgrounds, not cutouts

So I built specimen.gallery – a searchable library of transparent specimen PNGs, all CC0 (public domain). Organized by scientific taxonomy. No accounts, no attribution required, just download and use.

Stack: Rails 8 + Postgres + Fly.io. Server-rendered, no React/Next.js, just clean HTML. Using Cloudinary for auto background removal. MIT licensed.

Current status: ~90 specimens, growing daily. Looking for contributors and feedback.

Why PNGs specifically? They're the only widely-supported format with proper alpha transparency. SVGs don't work for photographic specimens. WebP support is still inconsistent.

Code: https://github.com/chispainnov/specimen-gallery Site: https://specimen.gallery

Open to technical feedback – what would make this more useful/valuable?