Just for example, I have this photo of a leaf mining fly: https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/174417777 . Suppose I want to attach the exact same photo record (174417777) to another observation. Is there a way to do that using the API? I know that it’s possible to duplicate an observation in the webs…

after a little more testing, here’s what i see: when using PUT /v1/observations/{obsID} to attach existing photos: the payload must not include "ignore_photos":1 the payload of the request must include "local_photos":"{obsID}":[{comma-separated list of photoIDs}] the list of photoIDs must inc…

I had a look for something like this a while ago, but couldn’t find any way to do it. At the time, I was convinced there must be something, since the API has a /photos endpoint for uploading photos independently of observations - that, is of explicitly creating “orphan” photos. I tried this out, ho…

[image] bazwal: What are the intended use-cases for this API, if the photo-record can’t be subsequently associated with anything? i had the same thought process. i thought maybe it was just laying the groundwork for a (future) way to associate photos to observations, or maybe it’s used to cre…

Yes, I also thought of taxon photos - but I couldn’t see any way to directly use an orphan photo for that purpose.

I spent a bit of time trying to figure this out. No luck yet, but the best clue I have so far is the multipart form data sent by the observation edit page (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/{observation_id}/edit). Open up your dev console, edit an observation, and take a look at the request i…

[image] jcook: local_photos isn’t that just uploading a new photo and attaching the new photo record to the observation? can you specify a URL reference (to an existing photo record)?

I thought the interesting part there was that it uses a photo ID instead of a file as the value for local_photos. That seems to be its way of telling the API, “keep these photos on the observation.” If you remove that from the request (and don’t set ignore_photos=1), the photo will be removed from t…

[image] jcook: I thought the interesting part there was that it uses a photo ID instead of a file as the value for local_photos. That seems to be its way of telling the API, “keep these photos on the observation.” hmmm… ok. i see what you’re looking at. so the idea is basically that if you PU…

Nice! I’m glad you were able to figure that out. I think I might find that useful at some point myself.

[image] pisum: in a case where several photos of the same organism (at roughly the same time) are loaded as separate single-photo observations, merge these observations into a single observation in a case where photos of many organisms are loaded together into one observation, carve out the pho…

[image] pisum: it looks like the effort is on the backburner, but were you thinking returning to it in the next few months or so? Yep I’ve been meaning to get back to it for a while. However I can’t see me getting to it for the next few months at least as my free time has all but gone for the…

Is it possible to use the API to attach an existing photo record to an observation?

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Is it possible to use the API to attach an existing photo record to an observation?

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