John Betts has added an awesome new tool to his website. Basically all his 40,000 or so mineral photos are now online and catalogued and searchable in a database! You can see it here at http://www.johnbetts-fineminerals.com/museum.htm. This tool has been very invaluable to us here at minerals.net as it gives us the ability to choose from so many more new pictures for each mineral. We once again gratefully thank John for allowing us to use his excellent mineral photos.
We have added new additional photos to the following minerals so far:
- Gold
- Silver
- Copper
- Platinum
- Iron-Nickel
- Mercury
- Lead
- Arsenic
- Antimony
- Stibarsen
- Tellurium
- Sulfur
- Graphite
- Diamond
- Acanthite
- Arsenopyrite
We are proud to announce that AfricaGems (http://www.africagems.com) and GemSelect (http://www.gemselect.com) have allowed us to use their images in the gemstone section. These companies, aside from excellent pricing and great variety of products, have excellent gemstone photos, and we are proud to feature them so that our audience can see what the gemstones look like.
One of the new features in the gemstone section is the "Gemstones in the rough" - which shows the gemstones in their native original, unprocessed form. Whenever possible we tried to show samples of pieces that are used by cutters in the gem trade.
We finally completed the template on the gemstone section. This is going to entail LOTS of work as many important gemstones are missing and the information is outdated. We have finished editing the following gemstones:
- Quartz
- Amethyst
- Citrine
- Ametrine
- Aquamarine
This is huge news. The MOST comprehensive mineral in this guide, by FAR, is Quartz. With HUNDREDS of varieties/subvarities, and in so many forms, colors, and styles, this took a very long and grueling time to complete. We seperated Amethyst and Citrine into their own pages due to the many individual varieties, images, and individual localities for these. We also seperated Chalcedony, Agate, and Jasper into individual mineral entries for this same reason. All this is done now. Next are the other Quartz polymorph's Tridymite and Cristobalite. These should go very quick!
