[ANN] Animal detection Available again - HURRAY!

[Heidi Hendry]

We are pleased to announce that our Animal Detection feature is available again!

Thanks to Kim and Matt from Microsoft AI for Earth for really helping us to get this operational again, and to Chris for spending all weekend on the code changes to get this up again.
---------------------------------------
Unfortunately we have a deadline now on the Animal Detection feature availability. Our current grant expires in August 2022. 

When Chris and I originally started Camelot in 2015, our goal was to fill the gap for a free, quick and easy image organisation tool that ran on multiple platforms, could run on low budget laptops, wasn't reliant on the internet, and provided some data validation for conservation researchers and students. We were especially interested in helping researchers in developing countries as resources are scarce.

We were so excited when 3 years later we were recognised by Microsoft's AI for Earth team as being a prominent tool in the field and able to extend our service to use the MegaDetector AI animal detection algorithm, thanks to Dan Morris and Siyu Yang (now of Lila Camera Science). This service speeds up animal detection immensely by quickly identifying non-empty images, which means that you can get to the important work of species identification more readily, and get those papers published!

We are now faced with the very real liklihood that we won't be able to continue that animal detection service past August 2022.

Thanks to the people who wrote in, it's clear that this is an amazingly useful service.
Chris & I are volunteers, and hunting around for grants and forming a non-profit is not in our wheelhouse. 
We also know that if we are faced with making people pay for the Animal Detection and then managing all that side of things (non-profit org requirements, tax, invoices, refunds, upset people), we just don't have the time. So we would let the Animal Detection go.
We have asked for donations, but they are few and far between and not even close enough to support that service.

We are wondering if anyone out there would be interested in partnering with us and funding the Animal Detection ongoing. 

If you are interested, please reach out.