Honestly, I’m partially venting. Something like an “iNat-sanctioned markup syntax” or the ability to upload photos directly to journal posts would give me a lot of piece of mind, but still means changing every photo in my journal posts which is extremely frustrating and something I may not have time for at this point in my life.
Using journal posts has been the most effective way I’ve found to communicate identification information to other people using iNaturalist and simply attaching URLs is not very effective for that purpose. The key is being able to see photos from different observations side-by-side. This is essential to effectively showing the differences of various structures or various species.
If the following is the position we’re going to have to deal with moving forward than this really disrupts my ability to do what I mentioned above.
What this tells me is that the ID guides I made are not only broken but also potentially unstable. I’ve spent many, many hours on those things and now I’m going to have to figure out whether I try to transpose them to some other format, keep them where they’re at and repair them as they break, or just try to print PDF copies, abandon them, let them break, and share the PDF as people want it somewhere outside of iNaturalist.
Worse than that, this renders any method that uses embedded images from a URL unstable. Unless there’s some fancy way around this that I’m not familiar with, this means I can’t use images from iNaturalist without downloading and uploading directly. That essentially eliminates the possibility creating the identification resources I’ve been creating in iNaturalist directly with the currently available resources.