I would appreciate the ability to download all my data off of iNaturalist in the case that iNaturalist dies for one reason or another, or my account is deleted, etc. It would be a huge shame to lose both my effort in observing and posting observations and the effort of so many identifiers who have helped name them.
Currently there is the option to export all your observations into a spreadsheet, but that doesn’t include the photos. I have all my photos backed up on a hard drive, but I know of people who don’t, and reuploading them here or somewhere else from scratch would be awful. Ideally downloading them from my iNat observations would have them formatted to be compatible with the spreadsheet or something like that so that information about which photos are associated with which observation and identification is kept.
I’m not planning to leave iNat anytime soon, and I don’t see any of these unfortunate events as likely to happen any time soon, but it’s just something I think about occasionally. Google, facebook, Flickr etc. have similar features.
I often don’t talk to people on here and avoid confrontation and being social. With the current state of politics are in and such it’s just way to easy to offend people and end up getting social justiced, cancel cultured, blackilisted, banned etc.
If this were to happen or anything else. It would be wonderful to have all my photos and data back, as I have put in a lot of hard work towards it.
Currently I’m working on a way to download your photos with the API, it will be posted to https://github.com/oliverburrus/iNat_Visualizations when I’m done. Also, fwiw, in google sheets you can get all of your photos embedded in spreadsheet by inputting the image url into the “image” function
I want this too. I tried the spredsheet one but it was not what I thought. One, I don’t have word. So maybe change that iNaturalist so more people can get it.