This is really gut-wrenching, as I took photos of some particularly difficult to spot species, and I’ve already deleted the original photos. Is there any reason this may have happened, and any possible way to get the observations back?
see https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/accidentally-batch-deleted-a-bunch-of-observations/29700/10.
do you know roughly when you created the observations and have any ideas about how the observations were deleted? how many observations are gone?
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18 Observations. Upon further investigation, they’re visible on the phone I uploaded them on. But when syncing, it stops during the process of number 1. If I could redownload them from the observations, I could simply delete and re-add them. But I don’t see a way to do that.
maybe you never actually uploaded the observations from the phone to iNat? (it may have failed while syncing.)
you could send your log files from your app to iNat to see if that might reveal anything. not sure what kind of phone you’re using, but sometimes your photos are automatically backed up to a cloud, and you might be able to get your photos from that service, even if you’ve already deleted them from your phone.
i guess worst case, if you can still see the photos on your phone app, you could take screenshots of the photos in the app, and that would be better than nothing?
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If you’re using a phone, there might be a “Recently Deleted” album you can use to re-download the photos.
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Most phones have a trash bin nowadays, like the recycle bin of a computer, so anything recently deleted should still be there. Go to browse files and find the bin.
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Just to add, deleting photos is very dangerous, a serious problem at iNat servers can lead to deleting your observations, having originals can save that data, plus iNat stores only smaller versions of photographs.
Yes, I screenshotted the ones that I no longer had the original photos of, and reuploaded the rest. Had to reinstall the app to get it working normally again.
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