Hi all, I run a field course where we collect leaves and seeds of common plants for later use. we use iNaturalist to geotag our samples and ID them. We also include a QRcode that is printed on an envelope in the image to link the sample with the image ID and location later. Is there a way for iNaturalist to identify the QRcode in the image and save that as metadata in the record?
Could you enter the data contained in the QR as observation field/comment? If the observations are in a project, you can then retrieve them when downloading its csv.
Yes, I don’t think there is native capability for this.
I would note that all photos in iNat observations need to include the organism itself so there shouldn’t be photos only of QR codes or other identifiers (though I don’t know if this is an issue for what you’re describing).
Because of this I doubt that iNat would want to add a function to identify QR codes (or other ways of IDing) because it might encourage uploading pics that don’t contain the organism.
instead of processing after the fact, process before you load, and add the extracted value to one of the metadata fields of the image file. when you load the image file in iNaturalist, the system can load the image metadata and map it to the resulting observation’s description, tag list, or an observation field.
