Hi there! I was wondering if anyone knew a way to recover deleted images from an observation? Essentially I was programming an applet to make it easy for me to tag observations with a certain tag, but it actually seems to have unlinked the photos on those observations while doing it. You can see on…

If it’s helpful, any observations in GBIF have a copy of the images, e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/13627551 is here https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/1880530909

How long ago were they deleted? [image] Change account deletion functionality to allow account anonymisation and prevent deletion of IDs The only time this is really feasible is before the previous week’s backup from our test server is replaced, which happens every Saturday, US time. For example…

I don’t want to promise anything, but I would try submitting a ticket at https://help.inaturalist.org/ – if @tiwane can help, he’s likely to see either that or the post here.

Thanks - I really appreciate your help, even if it’s not able to work!

That is helpful - thanks very much!

[image] jonathancampbell: I was programming an applet to make it easy for me to tag observations with a certain tag, but it actually seems to have unlinked the photos on those observations if you’re going through PUT /v1/observations/{obsID} or the v2 equivalent, i think you need to include "…

As it turns out, this was immensely helpful. I have all my photos stored on various hard drives, but with this website I was able to restore all but a handful of casual observations that hadn’t been copied to GBIF without having to root through storage. Thanks so much!

[image] jonathancampbell: Essentially I was programming an applet to make it easy for me to tag observations with a certain tag, but it actually seems to have unlinked the photos on those observations while doing it. Do you test your applet on a demo version on the iNat API before running you…

this is kind of an insensitive question. can’t we just be happy that they were able to resolve the issue at hand?

Using demo data is a common practice in software engineering. Usually when software engineers write code to manipulate data, they first test the code on demo data. If the code works on demo data, then they apply the code to real data. When someone uses an iNat API key to edit iNat data, I think the…

Recovering Deleted Images?

General

jonathancampbell March 17, 2026, 11:52pm 3

Literally about twenty minutes ago! It’s been a bit of a panicked half hour or so…!

if it’s helpful I can give a list of affected observations, or otherwise maybe it’s a case of restoring to a certain time or something?

Topic		Replies	Views
All my observations from yesterday have been deleted General question	8	891	May 30, 2022
Accidentally batch deleted a bunch of observations General observations	11	1633	February 19, 2022
Download of pictures from our account General web , projects	5	1039	March 2, 2023
Accidentally delete observations General web , question , ios-classic-app	2	232	April 28, 2025
Confirmed observations vanished from my profile Bug Reports	2	612	July 8, 2019

Recovering Deleted Images?

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