After some searching I found a lot of information about how to change licenses, but not much about what this means for GBIF and other databases.
I’ve recently been asked to make my observation license CC0 by a local biodiversity recording organization so that the data can be used by them. They pointed out that the photo license can be as restrictive as I like as long as the observation data (presumably limited to taxon, date & time, and location) is CC0.
I kind of understand this, but I’m not clear on what it means for the use of my observation data and associated media. If, for example, the observation is CC0, but any associated media is CC-BY-NC-ND, will the observation still be uploaded to GBIF (and still be useful for research) albeit without the media? If so, does this mean the observation data and media files are handled differently by inat/GBIF? How important to GBIF are the media files?
GBIF just aggregates the observation data, not the media, so feel free to keep whatever media license you want, and the record will still go to GBIF if it is CC0 or CC-BY.
If you want your media to be available for Wikimedia or other uses, then you’ll need to license it accordingly as well, but the media license won’t affect what goes to GBIF.
Correction: GBIF apparently does also include images with the appropriate licenses (thanks for the clarification @kestrel). You can choose to share only the observation data and not the image with GBIF, or share both.
Just to clarify, GBIF will include your image with your observation data if you have a media license that allows that. You can explore the iNaturalist dataset on GBIF and see that there are over 118 million images as part of that dataset, the largest image dataset on GBIF.