I have always been under the impression that videos can’t be uploaded to iNat. However, I just happened across this observation that includes videos: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/57362524 This is the first time I’ve ever seen videos in an iNat observation. Does anyone know how this work…

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but these appear to be GIFs, which are a supported file format. You cannot upload real video files (e.g. mp4) however.

Thanks, I was totally unaware that GIFs are a supported format! I’ve never seen them on the site before. Very cool. I’ll have to see if I can figure out how to add them to my own observations. Thanks!

Support for animated gifs is somewhat “off label”, and staff have noted that they are not guaranteed to be supported in the future. I would suggest “future proofing” any observations with animated gifs by including regular old pics in those observations as well.

I see, I guess that explains why they seem not to be too common on the site. Thanks for the tip, will do.

If you want to share videos, you can always link one in the notes section. I’ve seen many users take that approach.

That’s what I do when I get terrible pictures like this one , and it works pretty much perfectly to just host an actual video somewhere else (unlisted if you would prefer it not be visible outside of your observation, of course) & link it. GIFs are too low res to really be meaningful; in the observat…

I really enjoyed the GIFs, which is why I was curious about them. I thought it was cool to see the emergence in action. If they had just been in a linked video I wouldn’t have found them—I came across the observations because the GIFs were “featured images” for the Cicadidae family page, so I was im…

Animated GIFs come in handy when a certain behaviour calls for a series of pictures. But they are not necessarily small. The one I produced yesterday packaging 56 frames at 1280 x 960 pixels weighs nearly 35 MB. Of course there is no way to upload such a big file, so I just included a link in the ob…

Perhaps, but the benefit of it there seems mostly aesthetic (as far as I can tell, the identifying features of that cicada are visible in the sitll images), and the aesthetic qualities of an observation have little bearing on the scientific qualities of the observation, which is mostly what we’re he…

This is why GIF is generally considered an outdated format and not used any more on the web. Modern video formats are just way more efficient. Probably you would get the same quality with only a few percent of the file size. So I think it would make a lot more sense to instead support video files, b…

Some videos allowed?

General

doodoodoodoo August 25, 2022, 7:51pm 10

Thanks for the warning! I have one observation in gif format, I’ll be sure to make some stills out of it.

Topic		Replies	Views
Platform to add video type observations General	10	586	March 5, 2025
Videos for observations General	10	6282	September 29, 2019
How to convert a video so it can be posted on iNat? General	20	2087	April 26, 2024
Post short GIF-like video clips exhibiting a behavior General	7	1293	November 12, 2020
About linking youtube videos on my observations General	9	284	March 6, 2025

Some videos allowed?

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