Can I use photos taken by my grandparents or other deceased estate?

[tiwane]

Here’s the entire paragraph you took that quote from. I don’t think anything has materially changed between my response there and my response here.

@tiwane

With things like photos from a family collection, the issue is more about what iNaturalist is meant for. iNat is really a place to share one’s personal experiences with nature. It’s not a data repository, and it’s not a place to dump museum specimens. It’s about someone saying “here’s an organism (or track, or scat, etc) that I encountered.” So IMO iNat is not a great place for posting old family photos that you’re not directly involved with, as cool as they are. However, I admit it’s a gray area and if you curate the observations and there aren’t a ton of them, then it’s not a big deal. Just make sure they’re clearly marked, and you may want to create a separate account that clearly states what it’s for and that your account is a stakeholder. Sorry I can’t provide more clarity.

As to what you mean by “general tone of threads” I don’t know.

From the About page:

It’s NOT a repository for external data

Our approach towards advancing biodiversity science and conservation is to focus on supporting a large healthy community using the platform to generate, share, explore and curate data rather than focusing on accruing data. As such, iNat is not a data repository and isn’t a good place to drop off external data not generated on the platform. Please check out GBIF as an appropriate repository.

We often get people asking if they can import a museum collection or other large repository, and this the type data we don’t want added to iNat because it generally doesn’t come actively stewerded and wasn’t really reflective of somoene’s personal experience witih nature. That doesns’t meant it isn’t useful, but there are places like GBIF or IDigBio that are better fits. iNat can’t be everything to everyone.What’s cool is that there’s a place like GBIF that can actually be a repository for occurence data generated via sort of different means and platforms.

@AdamWargon

I don’t know if there’s a conflict, as, as I understand it, the PRIMARY mission of iNat is to get YOU engaging with nature (PERSONAL observations with nature)

And the SECONDARY mission of iNat is a biodiversity database.

As Caleb said, the About page no longer says that the primary goal is to connect people to nature and second to generate sicentifically usable data. It says something much cleaner:

Mission: iNaturalist’s mission is to connect people to nature and advance biodiversity science and conservation.

Furthermore, one thing people missed (or maybe we never emphasized this part enough) is the old text that followed iNat’s two goals (emphasis mine):

We believe iNat can achieve both of these goals simultaneously - in fact that they reinforce one another

I don’t think iNat would be passing 500k taxa if it didn’t have both that social, personal element as well as the emphasis on science and data quality. People want to contribute because they enjoy it, and also because they care about generated data that’s usable.