Plankton and sinking organic particles (detritus) shape how the ocean stores carbon, but they are difficult to observe worldwide. We present a global, openly available collection of about 8 million images captured by an underwater camera (UVP5) in 3114 profiles from 2008 to 2018 and sorted into 33 categories. Detritus made up 90 % of the objects and copepods were the most common plankton. The dataset can help train machine learning tools and improve ocean ecosystem and climate models.