Dear iNaturalist people,
I am a researcher at the University of Cambridge. I am actually a particle physicist, not a naturalist, but for reasons I won’t go into (unless you want to hear them!) I would very much like to make a dataset (to be used used for research not commercial purposes) consisting of:
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all images iNaturalist has of gastropods, (provided the image licenses would allow me to use these image for academic purposes), together with (ideally)
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the taxonomy metadata data associated with the species shown in the image, and
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any common name or image title that happens to be associated with the image, if there is one.
Rather than attempt to scrape this content from the iNaturalist website, I thought I should write to the site first, to see if there are preferred ways of doing a bulk download or bulk downloads. I only wrote to the site ~24 hours ago, so there is no reason I should have received a reply yet, but I also wrote to a fairly generic “help@iNaturalist.org” address that may get lots of spam, so I’m re-posting here in case the last place I wrote was not the best destination.
Does anyone on this forum know if there are preferred ways of doing bulk downloads? Or whom on the site I should write to to get a human?
[ Although I only want gastropod pictures, if it were easier from the point of view of the people administering the site, I would not object to downloading everything and then writing some scripts to extract the gastropods from within it – say. Though I presume there are better ways … ]
Christopher