How to Import Goats from a Photo or Screenshot: H.E.R.D. Import Guide

The problem with importing goats

If you've moved goats from one tracking app to another — or set one up for the first time with an existing herd — you know the worst part of the process. Most registries don't give you a clean export. ADGA doesn't. AGS doesn't. Even when an app advertises "import" features, what they usually mean is "you build a CSV that matches our format, and we'll load it." Building that CSV is half the battle.

So most people give up and type each goat in by hand. For a 30-doe herd, that's hours of manual entry — and if you mistype a registration number, you've broken your pedigree links.

H.E.R.D. is built to skip all of that. Take a screenshot of any source that already has the data — your registry's app, a sale ad, a paper certificate, even a hand-written notebook page — and we'll extract the goat information automatically. You review what we pulled out, fix anything wrong, and import.

What H.E.R.D. can extract

For each goat in your source, H.E.R.D. attempts to pull out:

• Identity: registered name, barn name, sex, breed, date of birth
• Registration: registration number, registry (ADGA, AGS, NDGA, etc.), left and right tattoos
• Lineage: sire and dam names, sire and dam registration numbers
• Description: color and markings, blue eyes, wattles, moon spots
• Notes: anything else useful — polled status, horns, awards, LA scores, conformation, breeding method, percentage

The first four categories map directly to fields in the goat profile. Anything that doesn't have a dedicated field — like polled status or LA scores — gets captured in the notes field so you don't lose information from the original source.

Two ways to use H.E.R.D.

For a single goat (auto-fill the Add Goat form)

If you're adding one goat, the fastest path is the Add Goat wizard's auto-fill option:

1. From your herd page, click + Add Goat → Add New Goat.
2. On step 1 (breed selection), look for the green "Auto-fill ✨" banner at the top. Click it.
3. Either paste the goat's pedigree text, or upload one or more screenshots of the same goat.
4. Click Extract. Wait a few seconds.
5. Review the extracted data on the next screen. Edit anything wrong. Click "Use this animal".
6. The wizard jumps to the review step with all fields pre-filled. Click Add to Herd when you're ready.

Three taps after the screenshot. If you have multiple sources for the same goat — a registration certificate from one angle plus an ADGA app screenshot showing pedigree, for example — upload them all. H.E.R.D. will combine the data into a single record, preferring the more specific value when sources conflict.

For multiple goats at once (bulk import)

If you're moving an existing herd or adding several goats at once, use the bulk import path:

1. From your herd page, click + Add Goat → 📋 Bulk Import via H.E.R.D. (Or, from anywhere in the app: Settings → Import → H.E.R.D. Import.)
2. Either paste a long block of pedigree text containing multiple goats, or upload up to 10 screenshots — one screenshot per goat.
3. Click Extract. Multi-image batches take 10–40 seconds depending on size.
4. Review the extracted goats on the next screen. Each goat appears in its own editable card. Fix anything wrong, exclude any rows that shouldn't be imported.
5. Click Import N animals. The wizard walks you through parent linking and any final cleanup, then saves them all.

What works best as a source

H.E.R.D. is forgiving — it handles a wide range of source quality — but some inputs work better than others.

Best results come from

• Crisp digital screenshots from the ADGA app, AGS member portal, or any registry website. The text is sharp, the layout is consistent, and there's no glare.
• Photos of registration certificates taken in good light, with the certificate flat and the camera roughly perpendicular. Avoid extreme angles.
• Sale ad text copy-pasted from Facebook, ADGA classifieds, or breeder websites. Even messy formatting works fine.
• One goat per source. Even though H.E.R.D. handles multi-goat sources, single-goat screenshots produce cleaner extractions because there's no ambiguity about which fields belong to which animal.

Trickier sources

• Hand-written breeding notebook pages — usually work, but accuracy depends on how legible your handwriting is. Worth trying; just review carefully.
• Tightly cropped images that cut off labels or context. The model needs to see field labels to know what the data means.
• Multi-page PDFs of an entire herd report. H.E.R.D. can read PDFs natively, but very long ones (50+ pages) may not extract every animal. Split into smaller PDFs if needed.
• Faded or degraded paper documents — old certificates may need a higher-resolution scan rather than a phone photo.

What to do when H.E.R.D. gets something wrong

The review step exists for a reason. AI extraction is good, but it's not perfect — and the review screen is where you catch and fix anything that came out wrong before importing.

Common things to double-check:

• Registration numbers. Look closely at long alphanumeric strings — the difference between an O and a 0, or an I and a 1, can be subtle. Compare against the source.
• Date of birth. Different registries use different date formats. We standardize to YYYY-MM-DD on import. Make sure month and day didn't get swapped.
• Sire and dam names. If the source listed only an abbreviated name ("Buttercup's Belle" written as "BB"), the extracted name might be incomplete. Edit it before importing.
• Sex. Look for any does extracted as bucks or vice versa. Rare but it happens with poorly cropped images.

Privacy: what happens to your uploads

H.E.R.D. is designed so your source files don't sit on our servers:

• Nothing is stored. Your uploaded image or pasted text is sent to the AI model for extraction, the structured data comes back, and the original source is discarded. We don't archive what you upload.
• Telemetry is metadata only. We track success/failure rates, error reasons, and token counts so we can improve the feature — but never the content of what was extracted.
• No data leaves your account. The extracted goats land in your private herd just like manually-added goats. Your sale prices, milk records, and finances stay private.

Limits during the beta

While H.E.R.D. is in beta, there are a few rate limits in place to keep the cost manageable:

• 50 extractions per day per user. Each "extract" button click counts as one extraction, regardless of how many files were in it. Most users won't come close to this.
• 10 files per extraction. Bulk imports cap at 10 files at a time. For larger imports, do multiple extractions.
• 10 MB per file. Large phone photos auto-compress before upload, so this rarely matters in practice. PDFs are capped at 10 MB.

These limits may change after beta. If you hit them and need higher quotas for a one-time bulk migration, reach out — we'd rather help you get your herd in than have you blocked.

Frequently asked questions

One last thing

If you find a source where H.E.R.D. struggles — a specific registry layout it can't read, a paper certificate format it gets wrong, anything weird — we'd love to know. The model improves every time we test it against new real-world inputs. Email us at team@herdmanager.app with a screenshot of the source and a screenshot of what got extracted, and we'll tune the system to handle it better next time.