Hi everyone,
I am fairly new to the forum, so may this has been asked before…
Currently I am working on a project where I try to provide an answer to the question how forest fires influence deadwood associated beetle communities in Dutch forests. I use in total 36 cross-plane traps to capture these beetles. I estimate to get about 6000 observations (currently about a 1000, but I’ve got a few more months to go), which I want to upload on INaturalist. Uploading this huge number of observations is very time consuming, so I was looking for faster alternatives.
There is an option where you upload a CSV file with observations. I already have such a file, although in a slightly different format. How does this work? As in, how do you connect photos with the right observations? It is already of great help to have this option, even if I have to upload the photos afterwards…
I believe this has been already talked in (https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/import-csv-photo-link/68377)
You will probably need to create a script in RStudio, Python, or another programming environment to associate the observations in your CSV file with the correct image files, potentially through the iNaturalist API or standardized file naming.
The main challenge would probably be linking each photo to the correct entry in your database. Dates alone may not be enough, especially if you have multiple specimens photographed on the same day.
The easiest approach is usually to use a consistent naming system for the images that matches a unique ID in your CSV file (for example: observation IDs, trap/sample IDs, etc.). Then you could automate the matching process with a script in R or Python.
For datasets as large as yours, automating the workflow is definitely worth it.
Ah great, thanks for the link!
I have some experience with R, but I don’t know if I am good enough to make such a script. All the observation need to be checked anyway, so I another option is just to upload the photos by hand (I am sure I made mistakes when sorting my photos). It might be a bit more time consuming, but the data quality will definitely benefit…
Anyway, thanks for the help!
I have had good success with uploading dozens of photos per batch using scientific names in the IPTC keywords tags. I use Picasa, a long-deprecated photo tool from Google, to batch tag hundreds of photos at a time, mark the best photos for upload, and export those to a temporary folder for uploading to iNat. There are also metadata tools that allow you to update fields like caption, credit, etc., in bulk.
Unless you have a lot of Annotations or Fields to add to each observation, this route is probably a bit faster than uploading a spreadsheet and trying to match photos to the resulting observations. Your original files also end up with more data attached to them, so if someone looks at them outside of iNat in the future, they will have more information.