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.

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)

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 …

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

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

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 researc…

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:/…

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

[image] escol: 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 ho…

So if i change my photos to creative commons does that fix this issue? Thank you for your help

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

General

upupa-epops July 29, 2025, 2:03pm 9

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

Topic		Replies	Views
Download a photo General	13	3477	April 19, 2021
Backup: what if iNat suddenly disappeared General	24	1912	January 23, 2024
One time bulk download dataset General	10	1404	January 7, 2021
Add option to download all my photos and data Feature Requests web	7	2642	October 31, 2023
Is there a recommended way to backup all my iNat data? General question	33	2892	March 10, 2023

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

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