It is possible for photos to be used for several observations (when one duplicates in the UPLOAD tool, or one duplicates an observation). One can see these on the photo pages: e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/608698906
But I accidentally some time ago loaded photos into the wrong observations - swapped them. Is there a way to move them to the appropriate observation? Without have to download the original and reload them. Or even worse, try and find the originals in my ancient backups.
After all, they are already on the system - it seems silly to have to delete them and then reload them, when it is just a matter of relinking them.
Tony, I’ve had to do something similar on rare occasions. Shy of seeking out the original images to place properly, the simplest, but not ideal, way to accomplish this is to view a misplaced photo in an observation by clicking on it, (on my Mac) right-click to make sure I’m viewing the largest format, save it to my desktop (Save Image As…), navigate to the correct observation and add the photo there. Then repeat the process (in the other direction) for your other misplaced image.
The big downside of this process is that the newly saved images lose all metadata and have a time/date stamp reflecting the origin of the newly downloaded image, not the original. That presents a discord between what your observation may indicate and the new metadata for the relocated images.
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as far as i know, associating an existing photo record with an observation is possible outside of the normal observation upload process only via scripting. i don’t think anyone has written any tools to do this specifically. i had thought about writing a page to do this, but i need to do this so infrequently that it’s not worth my time to do it. i could whip up a quick notebook with code to accomplish the task though, if it would be helpful.
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Brilliant. That will work. Thanks.
Seems though I need to be careful not to delete the unwanted photo on A before moving it to B, otherwise it will be deleted. So probably best to API the swap and then Edit to delete the unwanted photos on the web afterwards.
yes, and also you’d need to be careful to include all existing photos on B when you add the photo on A, or else you may accidentally delete all the original photos on B.