Recently I’ve been wanting to make offline copies of my iNaturalist observations, that way if something happens to the iNaturalist servers or the internet as a whole I won’t loose my observations. However, as of writing this I have 20,600+ observations. This means making physical photocopies is ou…

It would be extremely time-consuming, but you could use the iNaturalist2commons tool to export your images and associated data to Wikimedia. From Wikimedia, you could download everything at once. That would be quite a bit faster than downloading images and manually copying data from iNat, but it wou…

there’s this https://github.com/kueda/chuck/ (see the background at the bottom) It’s currently under development. I haven’t tried it myself.

Wrote one for you with AI . Tested, it works. Have fun.

I have more than 100.000 file. This includes 1700+ gif, audio. These are files i’ve uploaded on iNat and eBird. In the background, i have raw files and files that i did not choose for uploading, mostly because burst capture. Their amount is 750.000+ file and 38 terabytes. I use Digikam to organize…

As my workflow goes from my camera and GPS to my computer and then to iNat, all my pictures are labelled by the transfer program with yyyymmdd_HHmmss and written into a monthly folder Geotagged by Geosetter ID by me and iNat, the date, walk and ID gointo the [Comments] space of the EXIF (with Geos…

I dont know how to use this script. Can you please tell me more for a person who know nothing about coding.

[image] salix-babylonica: files that i did not choose for uploading, mostly because burst capture. Their amount is 750.000+ file and 38 terabytes. Maybe it’s time to curate your collection ;-) it’s part of the job for any photographer! I try to do this at least once a year, remove any RAW fil…

[image] wolfram06: it possible for me to make a digital time capsule of my entire iNaturalist account to be stored on the hard drive if I ever decide I need to do so? do you already have your photos saved in your own personal respository somewhere? if your intent is to download a ton of phot…

A couple of years ago I started working on a prototype of a tool to automatically sync iNat with my local photo library as embedded EXIF/XMP metadata, much like NaturTag lets you do manually. Due to some long-standing, bizarre, known iNat bugs and API limitations this was an unnecessarily difficult…

Advice on backing up large amounts of iNaturalist photos

General

thomaseverest May 11, 2026, 3:00am 2

You should read this thread and the ones linked there:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/backup-what-if-inat-suddenly-disappeared/47271

Topic		Replies	Views
Is there a recommended way to backup all my iNat data? General question	33	2935	March 10, 2023
Is there a way to mass download photos from your observations on iNat? General	12	844	July 29, 2025
Complete Observation Transfer/Export/Import Feature Requests	11	4385	September 18, 2023
Help exporting photographs to make hard copy catalogs for personal use General	4	815	February 2, 2021
Backup: what if iNat suddenly disappeared General	24	1967	January 23, 2024

Advice on backing up large amounts of iNaturalist photos

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