Different kinds of workflow practices

General
21

That’s an interesting diversity of workflows. Here’s one more:

  1. photograph (often with a mix of cameras from my iPhone to my DSLR), always while having a GPS running (either the Cyclemeter app on my iPhone or our Garmin GPSMAP64 if I’m carrying a backpack)
  2. load photos into darktable (an excellent opensource equivalent of Lightroom) to automatically geotag all my photos, tweak exposures and crop (if necessary), and tag them all up with taxon names and iNaturalist tags (e.g, “Insect life stage=larva”), plus descriptions when needed.
  3. export the processed photos from darktable
  4. run a bash script that strips all tags that I don’t want to share (eg people’s names) — that’s optional
  5. upload to iNat using the website

Rinse and repeat.

It works pretty well, but it’s still slow enough that I’ve built up a backlog of many tens of thousands of photos. I can imagine a future where some clever machine learning algorithm does all the IDs and the tagging for me and I can upload many hundreds of photos a week all at once. :-)

22

Also no GPS, and often no cell reception either.
I use the satellite view on the map, then work out ‘where’ I was when I took that picture.

23

Thanks everyone! This is all super interesting! And yes, so much diversity.
I wonder if a best practice could be quantified somehow through competition :)

I imagine Lightroom must be one of the strongest contenders still.
Though I’m curious about darktable @jon_sullivan …will have to download.
Also hadn’t though about running scripts as you and @zookanthos mention.
Didn’t realise you could add gifs too ! Thats great to know.

A few people talk about phone uploads also. I forgot but I actually do use my phone now as well. Mainly for flora… using it for insects is a bit difficult usually! Also a simple way to avoid having to change lenses to have DSLR as well as phone both on hand.

Super helpful. Will definitely try the GPS tutorial @lumenal mentions also.

Awesome. Cheers everybody!