I have inherited a collection of shells mainly from Diego-Suarez (Madagascar). It is not only composed of gastropods and bivalves but also of cephalopods (nautiluses, argonauts) as well as sea urchins and corals.

I was only 6 or 7 years old, and I remember the weekends on these vast deserted beaches of Diego-Suarez where, with my father, we spent hours collecting shells and corals. Over time, my parents built up a remarkable collection which they brought back from Madagascar. Shortly before their death, the house had to be sold and for lack of space, all the shells were quickly packed and piled up in a basement for years while they were the pride of my parents.

Now retired, I have decided to give them a second life. For this, Internet seems to me the best way to expose them to potential amateurs. So I gradually brought out the shells from the basement to photograph and measure them, then I repacked them and put them back in the basement (hopeful of finding a definitive place). As we open our Christmas presents, I opened, week after week, many suitcases filled with seashells!

Before creating the site it required a hard work to produce its content :

• photograph (front, back and possibly in profile) each specimen of several hundred species
• crop each photo on a transparent background and fusion of the different views into a single image
• Identify hundreds of species took me a long time burning the midnight oil and it is quite possible that some are still wrong, I humbly accept your enlightened remarks. I had no certainty about their origins (some shells were collected on the spot but, others bought from local merchants). One can however reasonably assume that they come mainly from the East African coasts or the Indian Ocean.
• for each family, write a description sheet (common names, common appearance of the shells, food, living environment)

This is how I got a taste for the world of seashells and I now understand better why they have fascinated so many people for so long. To my surprise, I discovered on the beaches of the French Riviera, many shells from different families (Bullidae, Cerithidae, Columbellidae, Conidae, Cypraeidae, Haliotidae, Pisanidae, Trochidae, Triviidae , Vermetidae, Arcidae, Limidae, ...) which enriched my collection!

Drawing on the experience of my research, I wrote a mini-guide for identification of shells which :

• lists some websites that have been of great help to me
• for each seashell family, its classification (Family ← Super-family ← Order)
• indicates some observation keys on certain details of the shells

However, to be able to identify a shell you need to know a certain number of specific terms and a minimum knowledge of the anatomy and structure of a shell. So, I made a compilation of information available on the web : shells for dummies

Shortly after creating this site I wrote a small utility (a bash script) to make my task easier and automate the updating of the site as much as possible after each modification :

I used three powerful free softwares :

• "ImageMagick" for pictures batch processing
• "LibreOffice Draw" for the diagrams
• "Gimp" for image editing

Time passing, I added features and improved ergonomics. This program can now create websites from various "collections".

The success of free software is due to the sharing of "source code".
In this spirit, this site provides the application that allows you to create sites on this model.