One big problem with the iNaturalist journals is that they don’t have a way to store images. You have to link to the image. I have some journal posts that link to images stored on my website but I’m thinking of getting rid of my website. I saw someone else had put their non-observation images for a journal post in an observation with private coordinates marked as captive and with an explanation and link to the journal post. Are there any rules against this? It seems like if we want to preserve iNat data, including journal posts, images should all be stored on iNat so they aren’t lost. Example journal posts with images I’m thinking of putting in non-observation observations here and here.
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I don’t personally think this is a good use of iNat observations. There are other ways to host photos, and I don’t think iNat has any obligation to media hosting for users’ personal journals. For instance, some users want video in their journal posts. iNat doesn’t support videos, and those users use alternate video hosting services for that. The same can be done for photos - there are hundreds of options for this. If users really want to force iNat to host journal images that aren’t observation images, I believe it is possible to have photos that aren’t a part of observations, though I forget how this is done and am not necessarily advocating that as a good solution (though better than making fake observations).
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I don’t know if it is a great idea either but I’m looking for ideas on how to keep iNat related data/info on iNat. Links from other sources change, disappear, etc. All the extra data/images could be tied to a legitimate observation as extra images but a chart comparing iNat phenology data from three taxa really doesn’t seem appropriate for that. Seems much better to add that to an observation that will provide a useful link but be hidden away with all the other observations that aren’t good enough to ever make it to research grade. Is posting iNat phenology data as an observation really worse than a blurry landscape photo posted as an observation? Or almost any observation with the location set to private?
You may be interested in this feature request: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/make-it-easier-to-insert-photos-into-comments-journals-etc/14147
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links to images on iNaturalist could change, too. it wasn’t that long ago that a big chunk of image urls changed when iNat began participating in the AWS Open Data program. they’ve also talked in the past about potentially changing the naming convention for image files.
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I admit that I have done this myself. The problem with hosting the images elsewhere is that photo hosting sites disappear (often with little warning). Photo hosting is not a lucrative business and you either need to pay a subscription or risk your images disappearing. I would rather keep them on iNaturalist with the journal post. If someone has a specific suggestion for a better idea, I would love to hear about it.
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Yep, I voted for that five and a half years ago when it was proposed. The issue still hasn’t been resolved.
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I did an experimental post as an example of what one of the proposed iNat journal post image observations would look like, which you can see here.
It looks like I can post an observation without a date and location, I can make the nonexistent location private, and I can give a lot of nos for the DQA. This should mostly hide the observation so that it would be out of anyone’s way.
As this is related to the genus Malacothamnus, I IDed it as such, So, if someone digs deep, they could find this observation. This would link to an iNat journal post about Malacothamnus, which would make the “observation” more valuable than many of the poorer quality observations currently on iNat.
Overall, it seems like an effective solution to the issue of iNat journals not storing images. As long as a post like this is related to iNat, iNat data, and helps the iNat community, it seems like it shouldn’t be an issue except that it isn’t about one organism at one place and time, which is where the problem comes in.
Thought for or against? Other ideas?
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I do wish there was an official way to do this. I’ve done a number of journal posts where I might have wanted to included a range map that I generated, but I did not include one since I would have had to have hosted it somewhere else on the web. It would be nice to keep associated images all in one place. I don’t really care for the idea of putting non-observation type images into an observation though. It is definitely a hack.
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I’m honestly glad the photos in journal posts are just links to photos hosted elsewhere. I make identification journal posts, and I frequently use images that aren’t mine to point out important ID features. Downloading someone else’s photos and uploading them myself would be unethical and potentially illegal, but linking to the original photos hosted elsewhere is perfectly fine and doesn’t require any special permissions.
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if you don’t want to use a photo hosting site like Flickr for whatever reason, Microsoft’s OneDrive service allows you to embed a photo that you have stored in OneDrive into a web page. Wikimedia allows you to upload photos, provided they meet certain guidelines. I wouldn’t expect either of these to disappear unexpectedly.
limited such use is probably no big deal, especially if you’re giving proper attribution / credit, but not everyone likes it when images on their site are used on another site. (they have to pay for that traffic, but they’re not getting the benefit of folks visiting their site.)
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These options don’t solve the the long-term storage issue. What if a user dies and has a bunch of useful journal posts? All images could be lost if not hosted on iNat. Some of my journal images are labelled screenshots of iNat itself.Those have no relevance anywhere except in my journal posts. They certainly are not good candidates for Wikimedia.
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OneDrive has a free tier. there’s no danger that images would disappear because someone stopped paying a fee, and i don’t know how Microsoft would determine that someone died to go and disable their account. i don’t see why that would be any less permanent than an image stored on iNaturalist.
if you’re ever worried that something on the internet is in danger of getting lost, that’s the whole point of the Internet Archive. just go there and archive the pages you think are in need of archiving.
you can always nitpick and find issues with any solution. it seems like you’re already dead set on using iNat in a particular way. that’s your choice, i suppose, but i’m not sure why you started this discussion then. you don’t need our permission to do what you want to do.
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There are no stated rules against it and I’ve never heard of staff addressing it. Given that there are no alternatives for image hosting built into journals, and that staff encourage people to use journals for creating ID guides for example, I don’t see them forbidding it. I do it myself.
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If going the “cloud service” way, you could create a special account for long-term storage of iNat materials only, to keep these as safe as possible from account suspension (due to copyright trolls, hosting family photos etc.). Or, you could upload images and texts of interest directly to the Internet Archive.
Thanks for posting this hack, that’s neat!
I posted a journal ID guide some weeks ago, but I stumpled over the photo web hosting issue.. it does not work with Flickr and I tried with Dropbox, but the pictures keep disappearing after some days, so I gave up on the idea of maybe creating more guides.. and thought about deleting the broken one. What use is a guide without pictures? I will now try your solution I think, once I am back home as long as there will be no heavy “NO” by staff…
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Flickr keeps scaling back their service and will probably go out of business soon (although I could be completely wrong). OneDrive deletes all your files if you don’t use the account for 2 years. Wikimedia is a good suggestion, but they are very strict about their licensing. For example, I wouldn’t be able to store image comparisons that include CC-BY-NC images (the default for iNaturalist) since that license isn’t allowed on Wikimedia. I also looked into using Google Drive, but it looks like they don’t allow embedding images any more. Do you have any other suggestions?
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make sure you have a designated person to manage your internet stuff if you die or are incapacitated. have that person log in once a year. easy.
this is not that different from what would happen with your Fly Guide. Google deletes accounts after a period of inactivity, too.
beyond that, nothing is permanent on the internet. if you fear that your stuff will disappear, use the Internet Archive to archive the pages you think are in danger of disappearing or would be a significant loss if they suddenly disappeared. (i would not pre-emptively load images there just to use it as free hosting. that’s against the spirit of the service and could come back to bite you.)
I’m not likely to die in the next two years thank you very much 
. But I am quite likely to forget to log into a Microsoft OneDrive account just to keep it from being deleted. And if I did die, some other random person is much less likely to remember to log into said account every two years. It’s just not a sustainable solution.
this is not that different from what would happen with your Fly Guide. Google deletes accounts after a period of inactivity, too.
Yes, I already said using Google wasn’t a good solution.
beyond that, nothing is permanent on the internet.
It doesn’t need to be permanent. It only needs to be as permanent as iNaturalist. So I’m still left with the opinion that hosting the photos within an observation is the least bad solution, unfortunately.
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I think that posting the photos you want to use in a journal as observations that will go to casual and stay there is making the best of a difficult situation. Storing images outside of iNaturalist, though theoretically great, creates a risk (in the long run almost a certainty) that the photos will be lost and therefore not available for the journal post.
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