As a hobbyist wildlife/nature photographer, I was looking for a solution to my problem, which was that it was really cumbersome to keep track of all the species I photographed, search by them, etc. I tried using tags/keywords for that, but quickly that got out of control, they were too long and too many.
After searching extensively and not finding anything, I decided to create my own solution for that. Since I always exported my best photos to iCloud Photos, so that I can always check them from my Macbook and my iPhone, an iPhone app was for me the right choice because this way my searchable library would be always in my pocket. I was using it personally for more than a year, and in the meanwhile I considered that it might serve also others as well as me.
Essentially, I can assign any species to my photos using a search that is powered by the iNaturalist API (thanks to the iNaturalist guys once again!). Even though it’s not automatic or AI powered (yet), it is as fast as it can be manually. Also, I put a lot of other features in the app which I personally needed and wanted in an dedicated wildlife photo organizer software.
I intended this post to 1) start a conversation about this topic, because I’m curious how other people manage this problem - and 2) inform anyone who has the same issue and my solution might match them, that now there is an app for that :)
What infrastructure are you using for this? What type of device (PC or smartphone, or both)? How do you “tag” your species?
Note: I didn’t find anything in the guidelines that would restrict such a post, I hope it’s not a problem. If it is, please excuse me and feel free to delete it :)
I’ve thought about doing something like this in the past, but the biggest drawback is taxonomy splits and lumps. Within a few years your tags would be out of date. What I do is just post pretty much everything to eBird/ and iNat, and use the dates as a reference to quickly find the original pictures in Lightroom if I need to go back and locate them. I use the cloud based Lightroom, so I can see the pictures on my phone, and it natively sorts by year/month/day. It’s not a perfect process, but does work reliably.
Create a folder with the data and location, e.g. 20251016_manassas_battlefield
Copy all photos from my camera
Create a subfolder for each species photographed (e.g. 20251016_manassas_battlefield\symphyotrichum_undulatum) and sort photos into these subfolders
This sets everything up perfectly to use my photo organizer of choice… Picasa. Yes, it hasn’t been updated since 2016, but Picasa does exactly what I need.
The best thing about Picasa is the search. Just start typing into the search field, and it locates any file that is either in a folder matching the search, or having a filename matching the search. Best of all, it does this instantly as you type. If I enter “manassas symphyotrichum”, I can see any Symphyotrichum asters I’ve photographed at the Manassas Battlefield. Or I can type “undul” to see all my Symphyotrichum undulatum. (Just “undul” is sufficient to match those since I don’t have any other species with that substring in the name.)
Every year or two, I’ll search for and try the latest photo organizer software, and every time, I end up disappointed. No one has ever matched or improved on the search in Picasa.
The other feature of Picasa that I use regularly is the side-by-side comparison, which lets me locate the best of my photos. Then I can just, right click and choose to open a photo in my photo editor of choice.
Thanks for your feedback! It sounds like a good workflow, I think I used Picasa some time in the past, but then I didn’t have photography as a so strong hobby yet. Maybe it’s time to revisit :D
It’s good to hear that you like this on-the-fly search solution, I really missed something like this too, so I implemented it also this way in Wild Vault. It finds any substring either in the scientific name or the common name in any of the tracked languages for species, and also in keywords.
Thank you for all the replies so far!
Just realized I didn’t even write the name of my app. Its name is Wild Vault, it is available here if anyone is interested: https://apps.apple.com/app/wild-vault/id6757435893
I take photos with a digital camera and process them in Adobe Lightroom before uploading to iNaturalist. I tag all the photos in Lightroom using hierarchical tagging, with common names as the lowest hierarchical level, which automatically matches common names unambiguously to scientific names. When I export the photos for uploading to iNaturalist, I export using the “Write keywords as Lightroom hierarchy” option, which adds all the higher hierarchical tags to each photo. E.g., I can tag a photo as “sugar maple”, and Lightroom adds the “Acer sacchurum,”, “Acer”, etc. The upload engine in iNaturalist picks up the tags and labels each of the species. Then I just need to proofread the names before submitting. In Lightroom, I can search “sugar maple” and all photos of sugar maples will come up. Or I can search “Acer” and all maple photos from come up, including sugar maples, red maples, etc. Lightroom isn’t free, and it takes time to set up the tagging hierarchy, but for me, it’s worth it.
I am curious as to what metadata should be written in a photo file to automatically fill the species name when uploading observations ? I am not using lightroom, but it would save me some time.
I use Lightroom Classic with the great plugin “lr-inaturalist-publish”. It automatically links the iNaturalist observations with the pictures in the library and tags the pictures for easy categorization and finding certain taxa in the library. I can really recommend the workflow, especially if you’re already using Adobe Lightroom Classic.
That’s pretty much what I do. I use Lightroom to assign keywords and crop the photos and then export as JPG files to use for both eBird and iNat (although I rarely use eBird anymore). It seems to work well. Because of splits and lumps, I don’t use the scientific names although I wish I had now, although I do use some scientific names now because it’s nice to be able to see all the photos of a particular genus sometimes. I use Lightroom on my desktop because I use it for other photos as well (family, travel, astronomy, etc) and I like the keyword and rating capabilities. It works for me but probably isn’t the best solution for everyone.
Wow–thanks for that tip. I definitely want to look into that as it would really improve my workflow. Although I do use the exports because at the end of every year, I create a calendar from the 12 best photos and I do a photobook of many of my photos as a way to remember the year. I like to browse through a photobook rather than having to look at a computer/tablet/phone screen.
Anyway, that plugin looks great so thanks for mentioning it.
I use digiKam. It supports hierarchical tagging. I’m working on making some software to integrate better with iNat - particularly to semi-automatically match up photos on my hard drive to photos & observations on iNat, and then it shouldn’t be too hard to update the photos’ tags with the appropriate one from the iNat ID.