I’m brand new to iNat and I was wondering what the consensus is around timeliness of observations. I have a bunch of photos of mushrooms from over the past few months, but I don’t want to clog up the feed with old ones.
Is there a general rule about how long ago the observations can be?
To my understanding, as long as the location and time data are accurate you can post any retrospective observations. There are even observations from years before INat existed that have been uploaded.
Welcome to iNat and the forum! No, there is no such rule. I’ve posted observations from 2015, which is five years before I joined iNat. I’ve seen other people with observations from as far back as 1968! Several months ago is completely normal and lots of people do that often.
Thank you guys! I’m really happy to be here haha. That makes sense that people would want to see observations across time like that. I’m excited to post them 
send it!
I think the general rule is if you observed the organism yourself in the wild, go for it!
If you observed the organism in a museum collection, then probably not; even if you did you should mark it as “captive.” For example, no fossils, please.
I’ve posted scanned slide images of organisms from 40 years ago and there are pics from others older than that such as from the 1960s.
You can upload older observations from whenever, nobody reasonable should give you any grief about that.
However, if you’re expecting other people to ID them in anything resembling a reasonably timely manner, it may be better to wait until (1) a slower time of the year and (2) upload them in smaller batches to avoid deluging your local mushroom identifiers.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-is-your-oldest-observation/27766/34
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/oldest-observation-date/19063
Two earlier threads
Possible record holder:
Non sequitur: not all of us who see fossils do so in museums.
I have not submitted this to iNat because there is no photographic documentation, but I reported to eBird an historical record of sighting and hearing numerous European Starlings (Vulgaris vulgaris, I believe) in Huntsville, Alabama in 1952 that I noted as an 11 year old birder. Don’t believe I can go back any further in accurate memories! (I go back to 1941)
I’ve submitted some scanned slide pics from the 1980s but others I haven’t because I wasn’t always consistent in writing the date and location on them. No EXIF data of course. I did keep good field notes back then but finding those data and associating them with individual slides has been an effort in frustration.
We haven’t got any eighties votes yet (1 vote there which doesn’t show as 1%)
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/poll-how-old-are-you-your-vote-is-not-public/60869
My oldest observation is from 2005, a Blue-eyed Darner, taken with my first digital camera. So, yeah; a few months is no problem. 
I still have quite a backlog of older photos to process and observations to submit. What I try to do is submit them in batches, e.g. 20-30 at a time, to spread them out in the Needs ID queue rather than dominating several pages in a row. E.g. I might do one batch in the morning, another during lunch break, and then another after dinner. That also helps avoid wasting too much time if something goes wrong with the upload.
When you upload older photos, please just make sure the dates are accurate for when you saw the mushroom! A ballpark date is better than just putting today’s date. Only mentioning because I noticed you’ve uploaded many mushroom photos since making this post and all have a date of Aug 6th. It’s not clear to me whether these are the older photos you’re referring to in this post, or whether you went out more recently to find some more fun mushrooms.
I also have a 2005: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/203114419
2005, like any year in the 21st century, feels like yesterday to me. ;-)
My oldest that I’ve been able to confirm an exact date for reach back to the last millenium. I’ve got some from 1991. I may have some pictures from the 80s that are suitable for iNat if I can ever figure out the dates on them. I wonder on these old prints, some have the month they were developed printed on the back. Would it be ok to use that as guidance to put a best guess at a date on them? Or just mark them “date not accurate”? I really wished we could put in date ranges for old prints/slides.