I tried using Gemma 4 (e2b) offline to identify birds. It confidently got them wrong, so I built a photo scavenger hunt instead

I wanted to build an offline bird/plant identifier that runs on a laptop with Ollama. Before building any UI, I tested it on 6 photos: Common Myna → gemma4:e2b said "Jackdaw" (confidence: high). gemma4:e4b said "Weaver Bird" (confidence: high). Monarch butterfly → "butterfly, undetermined" / "Heliconius" Peacock → both got it right Asking for a top-3 list didn't help, and gemma3:4b did worse and broke its JSON output. But every run got the coarse answer right: "there's a bird", "a butterfly on a flower", "red mushrooms", "a storm cloud". So I changed the design to ask the model only what small open models are good at. Outside Quest is the result: Type where you're walking. Gemma writes a 6-item quest card that fits the local season (Nagpur in Phone goes in your pocket. You only take it out to photograph finds. Back home, drop in your photos. Gemma checks which quests each one completes and has to describe the visible evidence. You also get a walk timeline and a route map from the photos' EXIF GPS, drawn offline with no map tiles. A few things that made it work: A JSON schema forces two yes/no answers per quest per photo ("is it the main subject?" and "completed?"). Both must be true. On my test set that gave 5 correct matches and 0 false ones. Safety filters are in code, not the prompt: quests about climbing, water, touching or eating anything, roads, or night walks get replaced from a safe built-in pool. Photos and their GPS data never leave your machine. Runs on a 6 GB GTX 1660 Ti: about 30 s per quest card and about 30 s per photo. Code (MIT): https://github.com/JayPokale/outside-quest Built with help from Claude Code. Feedback welcome, especially if a bigger open model handles species ID well locally. submitted by /u/Special_Lie3814 [link] [comments]

Source: r/ollama | 2026-10-06

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