I would like to have automatic storage of observations on the inat’ database,
but keep only , say, 1 week of observations on the smartphone .
Possible ? How ?
I can’t keep all my images on the smartphone , I get Android warnings for “storage soon saturated” . I already disconnected once from the account, but when I reconnected the whole set of images came back …
I guess that if I unset Auto-sync on app , I will have to manually sync every (valuable) observation, which is boring .
How can I do ?
The copy on your phone is reduced to a thumnail automagically, I presume. If such a feature exists I would like to know it and enable it. ‘‘Upload’’-button will upload all your not uploaded observations on your android phone.
Probably only the last 100 photo’s are stored on your Android phone:
Instead, lets clean up after ourselves and only hold on to 100 of the most recently created local obs photos. The rest can be removed when we clean up the web image cache.
I have a similar issue and was considering opening a request for clearing uploaded user data stored essentially as a duplicate on one’s phone. On my smartphone (iPhone X) iNaturalist is currently taking up about 2.8GB. Most of that (2.2GB), if I’m interpreting it correctly, is related to the “SDImageCache: 22,209,275 for 111 files” listed at the bottom of the Settings page. Each time I use the app the storage use increases in proportion to the pictures I take.
Conversely, I don’t want iNaturalist data being stored on my phone, essentially as a duplicate of files I have locally. I do want to retain my “copy” of each photo because I can be sure of having it, versus iNaturalist data being… out in the ether. If given enough time, I can move photos off my phone onto external storage, but it’s a bit finicky to do every day. Once I’ve uploaded a photo to iNaturalist, I don’t want the same amount of data as that original photo to just sit in the app.
Because of my technical difficulties in using iNaturalist from my phone, I developed the workflow of sharing my pictures to Google Drive, then uploading from there on my home computer. That could be an option for you, unless you have so many photos that they fill up your Google Drive allotment, too.
Uploading from a computer is a possibility, and it would take a little bit of time before the photos filled the default space freely available, but my workflow (if it can be called that) of uploading on my phone works well for me. I’ll adapt if necessary and cut-paste photos off my phone as the iNaturalist app eats into that space – it just seems odd to me that uploaded images that are technically just on the iNaturalist servers seem to be permanently loaded/cached on my smartphone as if it were serving as mirror.
Logging out of the app and logging back in should clear the app’s cache and reduce its size significantly. The app is supposed to be cleaning up unneeded stuff in the background, but that doesn’t happen if you’re constantly quitting the app. Are you quitting the app a lot?
good point… I do frequently close out of the app.
It also seems that clearing the cache helps – thank you. I didn’t get a chance to test it directly, but in an unfortunate coincidence the iNaturalist app became corrupted (or something – it would crash instantly upon launch) and I had to delete and reinstall it – that did have the side effect of logging me out, and resetting the image upload cache to nothing, which reduced the total storage hugely.
Just wanted to come into this discussion with a couple of data points. I noticed that iNaturalist was taking up 13.3 GB on my iPhone 11. I logged out and back in, and it had improved to 4.3 GB - much better but still a lot. I deleted the app and downloaded it again - after logging in again it was using a negligible amount ( .3 GB). It seems that it’s still retaining some of the cached data even after logging in and back out.