Guidelines/Tutorial - uploading observations from Facebook

General
1

In preparation for the upcoming City Nature Challenge I would like to encourage a few local groups to share observations that they have posted on Facebook. Is there a set of instructions on how to do this?

2

just paste the link to the observation or set of observations in the facebook post?

3

What do you mean by “share”? If the observations submitted to Facebook should become iNat observations then it would be better to use the original photos rather than the ones on Facebook without all the metadata.

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4

Which way do you mean this?

Share iNat obs on FB - yes that is easy.
https://www.facebook.com/inaturalist/posts/pfbid02UKxUbzs9n5FG4UtvfEwPWsrM8kqWQrJzX1NT47jQqagWEZPox7KgWjtMKr8MoycNl

Share FB to iNat - make an iNat obs first, then link to FB in a comment - but - why would you want to?

5

There are many people who post observations on Facebook. Many of them have never heard of iNat. I would like to reach out to them and suggest that they join iNat and share their observations. I believe that it used to be possible to link to Facebook and upload photos from posts. is this still possible?

6

this is for newbies - perhaps they uploaded the photo to Facbook and then for some reason deleted/lost the original. Most groups require location and date info to be included along with photos so the metadata should still be present.

the objective would be to get these Facebook posters to upload to iNat directly but that is step2

7

Maybe before my time?
I know taxon pictures are uploaded from Flickr, but never seen anything ‘from FB’ here.

I have iNat and iNat Southern Africa on my FB feed. When people ask for IDs on FB I link back to the taxon page or a relevant obs on iNat. And often see - please put that on iNat - in FB comments.

Does your CNC have a FB page?

8

It was formerly possible to import photos from Facebook, although those photos didn’t come with date/location information, so it wasn’t particularly convenient to do so and I don’t think it was a great method to onboard new users.

Facebook severed its link with us about a year ago, so it’s no longer possible to import photos from Facebook.

Like iNat and basically every other social network, Facebook strips metadata from all photos posted to it. There was never a way to import those data from Facebook, either from the photo or from the Facebook post it’s attached to.

You’ll have to get people to post their photos directly to iNaturalist.

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9

Thanks! I assumed that this was the case but couldn’t find any info re the links being severed.

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