How do I upload videos of bird calls from my canon powershot?

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How do I upload videos of bird calls from my canon powershot? I do only use the website not the app does that have something to do with it?

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welcome.

unfortunately, iNaturalist doesn’t really support video. some people turn their videos into animated GIFs and load those, but personally, i think that’s a bad workflow. when i have video to share, i usually do the following:

  1. load the video to a video-sharing site (ex. YouTube)
  2. load an observation to iNaturalist that includes a photo and audio file
  3. in the observation’s description, add a link to the video on the video-sharing site.

here’s an example of one of my observations created using the workflow described above: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/72320388

a lot of video players will allow you to extract screenshots from your video, and there are various video editing and sound editing programs that can help extract a sound file from your video.

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If you’re just trying to upload the audio, which iNaturalist does support, you will need to convert the video into an audio file. I do this pretty often with videos from my PowerShot SX50 by opening the video in Audacity and then exporting it as an mp3 or wav file.

Cheers,
Nick Block

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I have a Canon PowerShot as well and I also use Audacity to export to MP3 for sound files. Audacity is a free program. Once you have a sound file, you can upload it to iNat, but it won’t accept video files.

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Welcome @Bk-CapChickadee12 ! Thanks for this question…I wondered the same thing. Thanks to everyone for the advice!

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another great software to convert video to audio (I convert to m4a) is https://online-audio-converter.com

free, very fast, don’t need to download anything (works in browser)

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I use this website: https://cloudconvert.com

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Just had another thought: If you upload your videos to YouTube, you can use one of the free YouTube to MP3 converters on the web to get an MP3 file to upload on iNat. I’ve done that in the past, but the site I used seems to have disappeared. A quick check reveals there are several others though that might work for this.

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