Recycling natural beauty: what ELSE do you do with your observation photos?

I generally use most of my photos on my website, I have a gallery in it in which I put most of my photos. I also recently started uploading my photos to social media platforms like Twitter and 500px. As for the rest, I use it as a desktop wallpaper, profile pictures and such. I’m thinking of printing it and putting it around my house, but my photos are not that good yet :sweat_smile:

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I am with the calendar club, although not every photograph is an iNaturalist shot - there are plenty of scenic views too. But the family loves them (I put everyone’s birthday on it, v. helpful). I also make (have made) small notebooks then urge everyone to record their passwords before becoming compost
because I’m at the age where that matters. I have fun doing it and so far no one has asked me to stop!

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Not sure I follow. When I become compost, I don’t want other people accessing or altering my online content.

The Eastern grey sure comes in all kind of weird colour these days, your pic is great, thanks for sharing. Being myself in Australia way back then, I was amazed to see kangaroos hoping along road so I can appreciate your Aussie friends reaction. BTW, I meant leucistic White Fluffy Squirrel, my finger type faster than my brain, my apology to all.

Hmmm… I’ve been thinking of more creative ways to use my photos lately, but so far I have done this:

  • made a calendar for holiday gifts
  • printed a few small photos and hung them around the house
  • posted a few on social media sparingly, but mostly on my website

I’d be interested in ways I could help out someone/something with my photos since I enjoy photography so much. Someone mentioned donating them, maybe I’ll try something like that!

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If you go to Options (top right) from inside the drawing screen and find Classroom just scroll to the bottom choice, ‘Community’, and you can sign up for the discussion site.

Sean reads all suggestions and bug reports and it rarely takes more than a day to get a response from him just by asking him by name. (Pietre is also great) Gotta love great, independent developers!

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I’m surprised no one has mentioned digital photo frames yet. They are perfect for handling large numbers of photos without having to decide what is “print worthy”. Several people in my family have them and enjoy seeing the nature pictures along with family photos. I just have to remember that Grandma only likes “pretty nature” like birds and butterflies. She doesn’t care for the spiders, slime molds, and fly larva that are in rotation on my frame at home! For a while I was adding the common and scientific names to the photos to act kind of like flash cards for me, but then got out of the habit.

I’ve not made any big prints myself, but my brother did some photoshopping and turned a photo he took of a praying mantis into like a neon line art poster sized print that looks pretty cool. I was thinking of doing a similar effect on some of my dragonfly photos to put on a tee shirt or something. The patterns on insects seem to really pop with some filter effects.

It would be cool if iNat would do something integrating the observations of the week with the tee-shirt merchandise promoting the site. I was thinking that when I was looking through the most favorited observations on the year in review page. If a designer could come up with a layout that features those cool observations in a stylized artsy but cohesive way that also includes the name of the organism, date, and the iNat logo. Then make them “limited edition”, so you can only get that design for a set period of time. That might be fun.

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True, but I have a list so things can be properly handled if I “go” unexpectedly. Only my elder daughter will have access.

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Love the creative design on your website, also quality wildlife/landscape photos!

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I put a lot of my iNat photos on my instagram account as well: zhelicarol2018

These are Incredible paintings! There’s a Michael Chinery book (Insects of Great Britain and Western Europe) with 2000 top quality illustrations of insects that I have always been amazed by, yours are just as good.

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My ringtone is the call of Pacific chorus frogs that I recorded in my backyard and my text notification is a California quail alarm call, also from my backyard. I haven’t actually posted either to iNaturalist, I guess I should.

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Not with nature photos but with photos I have taken around my city:


I have had pillows printed. These are the throw pillows in my living room. Everyone loves them. I had a photo shop make them.

The same could easily be done with nature photos. Photo stores are wonderful resources for creative uses, especially printing on fabric (I have washed these a bunch.)

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Thank you very kindly! I love your work as well that I have just checked out. :)

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If you have pictures on your website, I would hesitate to repost them to iNat, because they might be flagged as “copyright infringement” by someone who doesn’t know that you own the website. This seems like it would be a risk inherent in any public use of your pictures outside iNat.

I’ve been wondering about this actually. I used to be very active on Flickr and had several of my images get picked up by blogs and other websites from there. When I first started on iNat, I imported lots of stuff from my Flickr account, which uses a different name from my iNat account. So there are literally thousands of pictures among my observations that have copies under a different username on Flickr, and some even elsewhere on the web. Short of looking through all your observations, is there a way to find out if any of your images may have been marked as potential copyright infringement?

You would be notified, if people are concerned about different website acount, they usually write a comment, so it’d be hard to find.
You can find all flags you got under https://www.inaturalist.org/flags

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Ah, good, no flags yet. I wonder if the system informs you if someone adds a flag without a comment. I think Flickr imports are probably less likely to raise concerns though because they come in with a bunch of meta data such as EXIF, descriptions, tags etc. Imports also require the accounts to be linked by logging into both to authorize the connection, proving ownership of the linked accounts and therefore the images. So that would probably be preferred over re-uploading the images to iNat separately.

I take mostly plant pictures. As I write books, I’ve started a Dent County Flora set of books with my plant pictures. This first year on iNat has really helped me with identifications.
Some of the pictures end up on my website.

I regularly donate my best photos to local environmental organizations, and they use them on their websites, print publications, and their social media (which I don’t use).