Although the use cases for uploading animated images are quite rare, as a microscope user, I’ve recently connected with fellow enthusiasts who help identify plankton. They all suggested that I upload videos instead, because dynamic footage allows them to observe the organisms’ swimming patterns and ciliary movements, which are the most crucial features for identification. However, being a complete tech novice, I have no idea if iNaturalist supports uploading animated images. If it does, could you please teach me how to do it?
Unless there have been changes, GIFs can be uploaded, but videos cannot be.
GIFs are discouraged though, due to the memory costs.
Also, I don’t think the CV system can deal with GIFs very well.
It’s better to post a static image and a link to a GIF or video from a different hosting site.
technically, yes, it is possible. however it was not intended to be - staff has mentioned that support for GIF files may be removed in the future.
i’m not sure that that is why they are discouraged. it always seemed to me like the bigger problem was just that animated gifs are an extra source of complexity – one more format to handle, a moving visual oddity/distraction among mostly static images, etc.
as far as i can tell, there are already places GIF animations don’t work across the platform. i don’t see animations in the Android app, for example, and the small square version of images used across the system already lack animation (maybe because they get cropped).
Gifs are essential to the presentation of microscopic animals and plants. If support for gifs is ever lost, almost all of my microscopic observations will be lost.
How I make gifs of microscopic images.
- Take a video at the highest feasible magnification. For me, that is using the 100x objective with 4X magnification via my cell phone.
- Select the best video sequences, ones that last between 6 and 14 seconds long. If it is longer than 9-10 seconds, you will have to crop it in order to fit under the 20 Mb image limit of iNat.
- Use the free Vid2GIF site to turn your video into a gif. It can be tweaked easily here (optimization, cropping).
- The same site offers GIF maker, to transform a focus sequence of still images down through an object into an animated gif.
Technically all you need to do is upload them the same way as other image files. However they are a bit finnicky and smaller file sizes tend to work better. Often the upload will fail and you have to keep trying. I know GIF upload works on the website but I don’t know about any of the apps. You can search the forum for previous conversations about advice and issues with using GIFs.
Pretty sure you can embed YouTube videos in the comments of an observation. I know it works in journal posts. This might be a better option that allows for better video / longer format. You could tag your obs with video comments with “embed” so you could find them. Or use an obs field that alerts team members to the presence of video comments.
You can also embed flickr links and such.
seconding this, image compression in GIF is much worse than youtube.