Introduction
Wingspan is a centralized image library and REST API built for Reiman Gardens at Iowa State University. Each semester, senior design and capstone teams are given projects that involve building applications using Reiman Gardens' butterfly and insect photo collection. Without a centralized system, each team rebuilds image storage from scratch, manually updates photos when content changes, and duplicates files across multiple projects, resulting in unnecessary storage costs and inconsistent content.
Wingspan solves this by providing a single hosted platform where Nathan Brockman at Reiman Gardens uploads and manages butterfly and insect photos through an admin dashboard. Student teams access that content through API keys tied to their project and semester. Wingspan follows a three-tier architecture consisting of a frontend client, a backend application server, and a data layer made up of a relational database and cloud object storage.