Platform(s), All: URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/236245670 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/236284462 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/234494612 Description of need: It is relatively common for the same photo to cont…

I changed the title of the request to reference the key element.

With a checksum value in the database for each uploaded image (this may already be implemented internally, but not available on iNat public platforms), then it would be easy to search for duplicate photos and related observations.

Waiting since 2019 https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/duplicate-prevention-notify-observers-if-their-image-checksums-match-others-on-the-site/258 Also 2019 https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/notify-user-when-new-observation-matches-time-stamp-of-pre-existing-observation/253/13

I’d love to see something like this. I’ve been adding notes that link related obs of mine which share an image - but it’s manually quite time consuming because you can’t do it as part of a batch submission (since you don’t have observation numbers yet), so you have to go back and edit each of them …

As far as I know, mostly, different observations use the exact same same image with the same image ID on the iNaturalist server, rather than uploading the same photo twice. So this feature does not require the checksum as a precursor. Of course, I totally agree that checksum is a much more importan…

[image] s-e: checksum i could be wrong, but i don’t think checksums – even with a sufficiently large hash size – would work like you think on iNat images because iNat modifies images during upload (to resize and remove metadata, among other things). [image] sunjiao: different observation…

There’s also the possible case where two obs share the same photo but not the same image (eg. one only has a zoomed in and cropped view of one or more of the images in the other observation). They are still the same photo, but not the same digital image and won’t share the same checksum (as would b…

This related feature request has posts on using observation fields to link observations: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/link-observations/1367

[image] pisum: i could be wrong, but i don’t think checksums – even with a sufficiently large hash size – would work like you think on iNat images because iNat modifies images during upload (to resize and remove metadata, among other things). Still, removing metadata and compressing should pr…

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Feature Requests

pisum August 18, 2024, 3:38pm 3

this kind of request would likely be dependent on the implementation of another request: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/photo-detail-endpoint-for-api/40481.

Topic		Replies	Views
Duplicate prevention: Notify observers if their image checksums match others already uploaded Feature Requests web , mobile-app	55	6129	August 4, 2025
Duplicate Photos in the Web Uploader Feature Requests web	17	2290	April 14, 2020
Duplicate obervations General	5	539	November 27, 2020
Share observations between users Feature Requests very-challenging	84	9325	May 1, 2026
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