Having a little time available and few subjects to photograph in the grey winter weather, I’ve started uploading some old observations from before I joined iNaturalist, but I’ve run into a problem. When uploading a particular observation from 2006, I discovered by chance that the reference photo for that species in iNat is actually that same photo, imported from a Flickr account I used at the time (https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/3641880). Does that mean that if I upload the photo directly to iNat it would create a duplicate observation (which I obviously don’t want to do)? The problem is that as the Flickr observations don’t appear under my name, how do I know which have been imported into iNat so I can avoid the same photo appearing twice?
Not at all sure I’ve explained the problem satisfactorily, but maybe someone can advise me :-/ ! Thanks in advance.
They’re not imported to iNat, iNat just can use photos from Flickr as taxon photos, there’re no observations associated with them (that would be against copyrights, there’s actually your Flickr name mentioned), so you can export them from Flickr without fear.
Sorry, my original question obviously wasn’t clear 
. I’m actually not interested in exporting/importing from the Flickr account which I haven’t used for years. What I wanted to do was to upload the original photo from my own archive as an observation in its own right. I just wanted to avoid creating duplicate entries. It seems from your answer that that would be OK, thanks!
Go ahead, upload your observation. Also you could got to the taxon’s page and ‘Edit photos’ under Curation and replace the Flikr image with the one from your observation. You don’t need to be a curator to do that.
I only use Flickr to add images to my Journal. I was a little surprised once when, by chance, I found one of my images on the wider internet!
might be a good time to set your flickr privacy, permissions, and licensing if you don’t want your pictures suddenly appearing elsewhere.
I don’t mind at all if my photos turn up in “strange” places, quite the opposite, I’m delighted if they’re useful in some way. ! I was just surprised to find them here :-) .
flickr offers more than just all-or-nothing licensing options.
in early 2019, a production designer actually reached out to me through flickr to license one of my photos for use in a 2020 olympics commercial that got made (for visa), but never shown anywhere.
Goodness, that must have been quite a surprise!!! In fact my Flickr photos (like my iNat photos) are all “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike”, so in theory at least they should be protected against commercial use.
it was a strange out-of-the-blue e-mail. I was skeptical, but responded. turns out the guy has done superbowl commercials in the past, so he was definitely the real deal. and apparently the guy goes through flickr and reaches out to folks regularly, and most of his messages get ignored. he said that he likes going through flickr instead of going through the standard stock photography websites because those stock photography websites often have images that are over-produced with unnatural lighting that make them look less “real” than amateur photos.
Some photos from my Flickr account were used (with permission) by iNat on the taxon pages before I became active on iNat. I’ve subsequently uploaded some of these as records, but am still discovering pics from 10-15 years ago on my Flickr account that I never submitted to iNat. Something to work on over the winter when I’m less inclined to be outside and photographing.
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