How do i create a data catalogue?

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I need some help with this. I want to start collecting data on the insects i find but i'm not really sure how best to catalogue the information for easy reference.

The information i want to be able to store is name, time/date, small description and location, as well as being able to include a small image of the insect. I also want to be able to have the option of adding more fields of data as time goes on, ie I might want to add the insects diet, life cycle ect.

Is there a template i can use? Can it be done in excel with the ability to very easily attach and display the image?

Your computer (every home computer) does have Word for word processing (Word is part of Office in my new Windows computer). And Word has an option called "data base" to create data bases.

And excel has advanced data bases- as I understand it.

Am not real up on the latest consumer data base software, but even ten years ago ( on our Apple) when I was a party dj and need to keep track of songs in my vast CD collection I made all kinds of data bases (text only, no pics yet) listing songs with "title", "artist", "what CD album its on", "type of music", "rank" (how hawt the public thinks the song is), and even a space for descriptive comments (which hafta to be REAL brief to fit the space).

When I read my old data base print outs some of the comments I made on the then latest top 40 can be quite funny to read, like "Britney spears ripoff", "Bob Dylan clone", "pop porn", "boy singer mopeing", Lol!. But I digress.

So even your old fashioned all text data base that I am familiar with would be a good start.

Just play around with Word and with Excel, and see what you can do.

If you have enough willpower (or someone to help) you could try using MySQL (MariaDB) database. There's PHPmyadmin for GUI, as far as I remember you can add pictures there (or any binary blob). With this database you could create internet page (it doesn't have to be online) for accessing /displaying all this information in more user friendly form.

I wonder if doing it the other way around would work for you - using the photos as the main "link". I was a keen macro photographer for a while, and I found that photo cataloguing software allowed me to do what I needed by using captions, tags and photo collections. I used Photoshop Elements, which had a good search/filter facility, but there may well be cheaper/freeware software around these days that would do the same thing. It made it really easy to have multiple photos of the same beastie, so that I could group together shots of different life-cycle stages, habitats etc. and use geo-location to record find-spots.