Hi,
I’m new here and have appreciated the friendly and knowledgeable community. Is there a way to export a file and include the photos I’ve taken? I know how to export a csv file with names and locations for a specific area. It would be helpful for my future trips to print a list that includes my photos with the names and locations.
Thanks!
Not really through anything user-facing, you’d have to use the API. See https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/developers
are you trying to download images files or create some sort of document that includes images? these are not the same task. if the latter, what kind of layout are you trying to make?
pisum…the latter. I simply want the photo, common name, and scientific name for each observation so I can print the document to bring with me in the field.
that’s sort of the layout that you get with the grid view of the Explore or Identify pages, which can display up to 96 or 200 observations per page, respectively. you can look at this thread from some tips on capturing a screenshot of these pages, which you can then print (or just save and reference from your mobile device): https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ephemeral-art-galleries-at-inat/53089/3.
if you need more control over your layout, since it looks like most of your observations have just one image each, you could use the standard CSV download to get the observations you’re interested in, making your you include the image_url field (which will give you the image URL of the first photo for each observation).
from there, if you want to lay things out in a tabular format, both Excel (365 and recent desktop versions) and Google Sheets have an IMAGE() function which will allow you to display an image based on a URL. here’s a screenshot of a simple example on Excel 2021:
if you want less of a tabular format, you could do a mail merge in Word to achieve this: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/using-microsoft-words-mail-merge-to-display-images-from-exported-csv-list-of-observations-that-includes-image-urls/36591. these might also be able to do something similar: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/software-for-creating-a-field-guide/29321.
there are other many tools that can handle this – particularly BI tools like Power BI, Tableau, etc. – but some of these may be harder to use if you don’t have some experience with data reporting.
if you can do some coding, there are lots of ways to get this information via the API and some sort of scripting language. doing things this way offers you the advantage of being able to get multiple photos per observation and unlimited layout options, but how you proceed here probably depends whether you’re comfortable with programming. (if you want to go down that path, just indicate what languages you’re familiar with, and i can probably point you to some examples for how to get started there. or you can search the forum for examples.)
if you wanted to display a lot of information per observation (besides just photos and names), here’s something i made a while back that might help there: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/tool-for-making-observations-printer-friendly/4513.
Super helpful, pisum! Thank you very much for taking the time to outline the instructions and give me several options! I very much appreciate your kindness. :)
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