Progress in digitising natural history collections held by museums and herbaria. Many of these are accessible from either the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, iDigBio or BioCaSE. To examine the rate and volume of these specimen images, we used six snapshots of these databases taken since 2019. This was achieved using Preston, a biodiversity dataset tracker \citep{elliott_signed_2022,poelen_jhpoelenspecimen-image-index_2022,poelen_preserved_2022}. Although likely to be an underestimate of the specimen images that exist, because not all images are linked to the snapshot datasets, trends give an indication of progress towards digitising the world’s natural history collections. The number of available images is increasing approximately exponentially. There are seven times more plant specimens than insects in our most recent snapshot, even though insects are far more numerous in nature, an estimated 5.5 million species of insects (Stork 2018) vs 350,000 plants \citep{cheek_new_2020}. Nevertheless, the rate of increase of insect images is faster and if one extrapolates the curves it is easy to imagine that insect images will surpass plant specimens in a few years. Imaging of far less numerous but well-represented taxa in natural history collections, such as mammalia (~6,400 species; \citealt{burgin_how_2018}), while increasing, is not doing so as rapidly as insects.