I’d prefer to see an option where photos are stored. I don’t want photos of wildlife filling up my phone’s primary photo album. Currently I take the photo to record finding a species and then have to delete the photo later.
Yes! And it is so hard to manually sort out which photos are inat photos. If I take them through the app they get named differently, which helps, but putting them in a seperate folder would be way better.
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Yes! I admittedly need to clear out photos regardless, but I have 2000+ photos in a “nature” album, and most of those I dragged there after the app created them.
Do most people delete photos from their phone after uploading to INat? My phone album is packed with things I wouldn’t normally save but I was hesitant to delete. I’ve participated in a few of the bioblitzes lately so may have gone overboard! Is there any reason not to delete?
I do, unless I think the photo is actually one I think I’ll look at or share later. Deleting the photo from your phone, once the observation has been synced, won’t affect the observation, so it’s up to you.
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This would be a great feature! I certainly would like to see this. Would this make a lot storage issues though?
@kpespisa it looks like you are a Seek user, correct? You don’t use the iNaturalist app? If so, is this request only for Seek?
I am so annoyed when my camera roll contains 4000 photos from Inaturalist
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Yeah I know! I recently had to delete about 500-800 photos from my camera roll.
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Seek: it would be possible to add an option where photos taken in Seek were stored in their own album on you device, at least on Android.
iNaturalist iOS: a no-go for iOS, saving photos in the app is not really how iOS works.
iNaturalist Android: we could possibly save photos taken in iNat to a specific folder on your device, or photos could be stored internally in the app. However, in the latter case we wouldn’t be adding any photo management functionality to the app. So the only way to delete the photo would be to delete the observation, or delete the photo when editing the observation. that would not be an improvement, in my book.
I was just wondering the same thing (about deleting the photos). As a test, I moved the photos elsewhere and the photos were still present in the (Android) app. I guessed that the app (after syncing) references the photos from the Internet. However, I was glad to hear a confirmation from you (@tiwane) .
To second the OP, I was surprised to see the photos at the top level of DCIM. I’d expect to see them in /iNaturalist/Media or Pictures/iNaturalist. In addition to not violating the Principal of Least Astonishment (POLA), moving the photos there would also make our organizational lives easier.
I wanted to boost this, maybe it is a lost cause, but i am tryign to transfer my photos to my computer from my iphone which barely works at all for some reason. 99% of them are inat photos i don’t really need, but if i delete them i lose the kid photos mixed in which i don’t want to lose. If it isn’t possible to let people turn off photo saving is there a way to have them save on the phone in a different folder? Then i could delete them or just save the few i want, without losing other non inaturalist photos i do want.
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It’s not something we’d add to the current app (which we’re only doing bug fixes for), but I believe it’s possible. Seek saves photos to a Seek album in the Photos app in iOS/iPadOS.
Apple’s AI search is pretty good…you might try searching for “people” or “kids” or something and see how it does.
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I just started using the “Hide Photo” feature on an iPhone both to clear photos from “All Photos” and to help me remember which photos I’ve already added to iNaturalist and which ones I haven’t gotten to.
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Totally agree. I would like to take photos of somethings without saving them on the phone. It is a pain to go back through the camera images and figure out what has already been uploaded.
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I’m going to close this. We’re not adding new features to the current mobile apps, and don’t plan to add this to the upcoming one.