Is there a way to mass download photos from your observations on iNat?

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Is there a way to mass download photos from your observations on iNat? I’ve been thinking about what would happen if/when iNat disappears and I want to back up my older photos somewhere else as they’re currently only on iNat.

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I was thinking the same thing, it would be nice to have a backup feature to a cloud platform like Google Drive or other alternatives (automatically, every x days)

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As far as I know, you can’t. It would likely be too much of a strain on the iNaturalist servers. Keep the originals and do backups yourself (like on a second hard drive or something similar). You can’t even download a list of the original filenames of your photos that you uploaded to iNaturalist (which could be useful for making scripts to organize your photos in different ways on your hard drive).

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There probably should be some feature to get your data that you submitted?
Even if there currently isn’t…

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You can suggest this as a feature request, I’d vote for it

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https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000170342-how-can-i-download-data-from-inaturalist-
One of existing options allows to export a .csv file (spredsheet/table) with data, although the images and sounds are simply links to iNat.
I assume this is mainly intended for researchers

In theory, you can replace “medium.jpg” to “original.jpg” in image links (inside the spreadsheet), copy the column and use some program to slowly mass-download them (your own photos). The freely-licensed (CreativeCommons) images are hosted on a separate Amazon S3 server, unless your photos are All Rights Reserved - which is the case for jacksonfrost (then they are hosted by iNat itself on their own infrastructure and which they have to pay for, unlike Amazon hosting which is offered for free).

If you don’t have too many photos/observations it probably wouldn’t be too much strain? Besides the original export which is managed by iNat, and unless the photos are hosted directly by iNat… (see what I said above)

Anyways, you may want to ask staff for advice first.

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Someone asked me how to do this, so I wrote a Python program that downloads the original size images of all of your observations. The hardest part was keeping the original filenames - only logged in users can see their filenames, so I gave the program the ability to use a session cookie.

https://github.com/AlanRockefeller/inat.photodownloader.py

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There should be a reminder that the original file size is maximum 2048 pixels from the original size. iNaturalist is not an archive.

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See also this thread and the other threads linked below it: Add option to download all my photos and data

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the reason this is is an important note is that you need to be careful how much stuff you download from the non-Amazon bucket. as noted in https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/api+recommended+practices:

Downloading over 5 GB of media per hour or 24 GB of media per day may result in a permanent block

as others have noted, (except for the licensed photos found in the Amazon Open Dataset bucket) iNat shouldn’t be treated as an image archive.

if you’re using something like @alan_rockerfeller’s program, you need to be really careful of other limits, too:

  • Please keep requests to about 1 per second, and around 10k API requests a day
  • The API is meant to be used for building applications and for fetching small to medium batches of data. It is not meant to be a way to download data in bulk
  • We may block IPs that consistently exceed these limits
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So if i change my photos to creative commons does that fix this issue? Thank you for your help

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if you license your photos, they will get moved to the Amazon Open Data Set. in my mind, as long as the AWS Open Data program continues, the only way images disappear is if you delete your images, if someone hacks iNat and deletes those images, or if some sort of major catastrophe takes out the AWS node and all its backups (which would probably brick a big chunk of the internet). i don’t know how iNat handles the backing up of the non-AWS stuff (maybe some sort of setup involving Azure?), but i would guess that it’s fairly secure there, too, although if iNat went defunct, that might cause access to those photos to go offline (whereas the AWS set would likely remain available). in the major catastrophe case, i’d be surprised if you would do a better job of backing up your photos than either iNat or AWS can.

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You should probably consider using a CC license for your photos anyway, since all of your currently 40k observations, and most likely even more photos, could be hosted for free, e.g. with at least something like CC-BY-NC (with Attribution, non-commercial)

Yes, exactly.

( it didn’t link well in your message because of : symbol, correct page is https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/api+recommended+practices )

Also here’s a complementing information from here:

https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/docs/#/

Photos served from https://static.inaturalist.org and https://inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com have multiple size variants and not all size variants are returned in responses. To access other sizes, the photo URL can be modified to replace only the size qualifier (each variant shares the exact same extension). The domain a photo is hosted under reflects the license under which the photo is being shared, and the domain may change over time if the license changes. Photos in the inaturalist-open-data domain are shared under open licenses. These can be accessed in bulk in the iNaturalist AWS Open Dataset. Photos in the static.inaturalist.org domain do not have open licenses.

Also related:
https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/49564-inaturalist-licensed-observation-images-in-the-amazon-open-data-sponsorship-program/