Breed Whisperer — know any dog with Google AI (and pure CSS)

A dog breed identifier for the DEV Weekend Challenge: Dog Days Edition. Upload a photo of any dog and Google AI (Gemini) whispers back its breed, confidence, personality and care tips — in seconds. The dog on this page isn't a photo: it's drawn entirely in pure CSS, no images, no SVG.

🔗 Live demo: https://dog.bmops.tech

The story

Every dog has a story. The Elkhound that guarded Viking hunts. The lab who's "just a good boy" (very rare breed). The park stranger who absolutely deserves a treat.

Breed Whisperer is my tiny contribution to understanding them: point your camera at a dog and ask Google's newest vision model. It tells you who they are, what they're like, and how to take care of them. Three seconds, no signup, nothing stored.

What I built

• 🐶 Pure-CSS dog — the hero illustration is hand-drawn with divs, layered box-shadow and gradients (the cyanHarlow technique): floppy ears, a wagging tail, a panting tongue, a collar with a shiny tag. The tail and tongue animate with CSS keyframes (disabled for prefers-reduced-motion)
• 📷 Drag-and-drop upload — click or drop a photo, see a live preview, and Gemini reads it
• 🧠 Google AI identification — the photo goes to gemini-3-flash-preview via the Gemini API, which returns breed, confidence, a personality read, a care tip, and a "did you know?" fact
• ♿ Accessible by default — skip link, semantic landmarks, keyboard-operable upload (Enter/Space), role="status" live regions, visible focus, 0 axe-core violations, responsive from 360px to desktop

How it works

1. Snap it — any camera, any dog, any park
2. Gemini sees — one private request to Google AI's vision model; nothing is stored
3. Whisper back — breed + personality + care tips in under ten seconds

The Google AI bit (and a 2026 gotcha)

I chased a 401 for a while before realising the API key format changed: new keys are AQ... and must be sent with the x-goog-api-key header, not ?key=. And gemini-2.5-flash is retired for new accounts — gemini-3-flash-preview is the current workhorse. Once I switched both, the first real photo (a very majestic Norwegian Elkhound) came back perfectly:

Elkhound Noruego · confidence: alta
— national dog of Norway, used by Vikings to hunt moose.
Care: frequent brushing (dense double coat) + lots of daily exercise.

Why pure CSS for the dog

The challenge is about dogs, and dogs are character. I wanted the page itself to have a personality — not a stock photo, but a hand-drawn companion rendered by the browser. Every shadow on its fur is an inset box-shadow; every ear is a rotated border-radius ellipse. The whole illustration is ~200 lines of CSS. No <img>, no <svg>, no canvas — one file, ~17 KB.

What I learned / enjoyed

• The new Google AI key format (AQ... + x-goog-api-key header) — documented for the next dev who hits the same wall
• Layered inset shadows make CSS fur feel soft (same trick as clay pots in my previous challenge entry 😄)
• Gemini's vision model handles messy real-world photos (park dogs, dark fur, motion blur) surprisingly well
• An accessible upload widget is easier than it looks: one input, two drag events, three ARIA attributes

Tech

HTML5 · CSS3 (pure-CSS illustration, keyframes, prefers-reduced-motion) · Vanilla JS (fetch, drag & drop, live regions) · Google AI — Gemini 3 Flash Preview (vision) · FastAPI backend · Zero images · Zero dependencies · 0 axe violations

Built for the DEV Weekend Challenge: Dog Days Edition · submitted in the **Best use of Google AI* category · all illustrations are pure CSS · no dogs were emotionally manipulated (much).*