Hi, I need some advice. My phone is overloaded with photographs that I’d like to delete after posting to iNaturalist. I’ve got hundreds of photos from the city nature challenge and I’d like to get rid of the random leaves of trees and grasses. I’m just afraid that if I delete my photographs from my phone and I would also delete them from my postings.
Getting rid of some of these photos right after I post to iNaturalist would help. Since I am endlessly scrolling to find a new observation that I took on my phone and that needs to be loaded onto iNaturalist.
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As long as the observations are synced to iNat, then iNat is no longer using the locally stored photo. But it’s important to note that if your original photo is larger than 2048x2048, then the version that iNat is storing is lower resolution. So if you had larger photos (which most people do), iNat is not storing your full resolution original image.
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Yes, and once they are uploaded I encourage you to delete the photos. Inat saves the photos forever, and unless you plan on saving a few high-quality pictures, then I recommend you delete all photos.
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Definitely don’t delete the photos! You can’t know if server crashes or you’ll need a larger version, photos you post you need to store, move the from smartphone somewhere else to save the space.
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I delete my photos after I upload to Inat, unless they have some importance and rarity.
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Over 99% of my observations taken from my smartphone get deleted. Only a few “rarities” get saved.
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Of course you can if you think that neither you nor anybody else will ever need these photos again in the future.
As for me, I keep all my photos on an external hard drive, sorted by place and date, just in case. First of all, these have a higher resolution than those posted on iNat. Secondly, a backup is never amiss. Thirdly, one never knows what exactly in their photos may turn out to be important in the future, maybe some detail in the background that was not even considered worthy of a separate observation page. I suspect that 99.9% of my original photos do not actually contain any important additional information - however, I feel safe that, if I ever need that 0.1%, it is not lost forever.
Disclaimer: As a researcher by trade, I am used to keeping record of as much as possible and definitely do not recommend this way of action to everybody :)
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I give it a few days to see if anyone identifying thinks I need an additional picture to help support the id and then I delete, unless I really like the photo for some reason. I am, however, bad about deleting because I hate sitting there doing it, so I have more photos on my phone than I should. But, no, your pics on iNat should not disappear. :)
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Fantastic! The photos I want to remove are mostly scraggly quick shots of common “weedy” things and individual photos of oak and maple leaves and grasses. I plan to keep the bulk and especially the nicer photos and the unusual ones, but when I take 1,000 photos, scrolling thru them all to get to the next post is taking the fun out of it and taking time away from me trying to id the stuff I’ve actually seen. Now I’m just plopping them down under genus just to get them on iNat for the CNC before time is up. (By the way I actually love weeds)
Thank you so much for the replies. Very helpful.
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All photos that are crappy but good enough for iNat I upload then delete. I probably save 10% or so of the photos I take.
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If you’re not opposed to sending more dollars to Mr. Jeff’s humongous pockets, Subscribe to Amazon Prime and install their photo app.
It allows you to automatically upload unlimited photos to your account – or even videos, but those are not free. But it’s a nice photo ‘backup’ solution and you can configure the app to upload everything, or just selected folders, plus on mobile, or just when you get back to your wifi zone.
The storage space is not that accessible, but the default view is by date taken so that’s helpful. You can also create Amazon only albums, which are basically like Lightroom Collections – more like links to the actual saved files.
JPG, TIF, PSD, RAW, GIF, PNG etc. If it’s an image file, it will take it, no matter how big (including layered files).
You can also drag and upload at any computer through their website portal.
After I batch process my RAW files from my cards through PureRaw, I routinely upload the RAW originals to Amz Photos for safe backup.
Also… I have a Samsung phone with an external SD slot. 250gb storage. Saves a lot of worries. But I get the sense that iNat is heavily populated by the Apple crowd, and they don’t have that option.
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Again, you never know what will happen and what is valuable, I’ve been asked for originals of terrible phone photoes before, and was glad I stopped deleting any originals long ago.
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I recently upgraded my RAW batch processor (DxO’s PureRaw) package and that’s when I discovered that it did a measurably visibly better job at noise removal than it’s previous version (which I always thought was the best possible).
Thank goodness for saving those noisy RAW originals!
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My enthusiasm for taking photos is infinite but storage space is not. I remove most photos, hoping that iNaturalist has an adequate back-up in place. I do keep ones I like or think will be useful.
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is inat’s file compression in place because it would take a significant amount of storage space on inat’s end to store all those images? i wonder how much it costs just to keep stored all the photos the way they are already lol. do you know if audio files get compressed similarly in observations?
Definitely up to you and what your pictures are like/what they mean to you. Really exciting, special or impressive pictures I’ll keep and save to my Google Photos. The rest, I upload and bid adieu. But also majority are taken just to be uploaded and have no personal value to me other than to upload them. If something ever happens to the pictures I don’t keep elsewhere due to something going on with iNaturalist, I’d be a lot more upset with whatever the issue is with the site and how to deal with a loss of the data rather than accessing the specific pictures again. Everybody approaches the site in their own way, though, so how I manage my stuff is definitely going to be different from a lot of other people, and I think it really depends on how you use the site or more so what you use the site for.
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With licenced photos it costs nothing for iNat.
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There is no post-processing on audio files to my knowledge.
As far as I know, the maximum size and compression have been the same for a long time. You can read more in this thread.
And more details about the program Marina mentioned here.
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To add to what Marina said: frequently I see photos that look interesting but would like to see from a different angle. On several occasions asking the uploader for additional photos has turned up some great finds. Storing your photos (even the crappy ones) might mean that your observation gets ID’d if an identifier asks.
Because remember, unless you specialize in that taxon, you don’t know what angle our part might be needed, and what species will be of interest to a specialist.
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I would never be able to have other photos of not-Inat stuff since they would accidentally be deleted in the mix. Also the amount of phone storage 40K photos takes up is 156 GB.
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