iNaturalist has been having some difficulty interacting with Google photos for a while now, and to be honest, I’m seeing a pretty obvious problem here: Using the user’s device as a file-transfer intermediary. When I add an image from Google Photos to iNaturalist, I’m expecting iNaturalist servers …

If inaturalist only links to the photo in your Google photos, then they really don’t have the photo. If you choose to delete it at some point in the future, then they would lose it too.

Yes, there are unfortunately many thousands of old observations that now lack photo evidence because the link to Picasa, Flickr, or Facebook was changed or the photo was deleted on the external website. All photos should be stored locally on iNat. @j-k is this a feature request, bug report, or just…

I believe my reply here covers this as well.

"Google Photos" vs "iNaturalist": The fundamental problem

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Google Photos Import is currently not functional News and Updates web	3	1416	February 14, 2019
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"Google Photos" vs "iNaturalist": The fundamental problem

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