There is the option to upload the video to an external repository, and then place a link to it in the description. For the few times that a full video vs GIF would help, I think this option is best. At least until iNat’s resourcing and development is at a point where they naturally look to extending to video support
Allowing 10 to 15 second videos would be excellent. When taking photos of plants with the phone the number of times I have had birds start to call, and having to go and find the recording device, and then find the app, start the app. Or abandon an entry to try and get a recording. Switching mode in camera is quick and easy. Interrupting an observation is painful.
Also there are camera traps and security devices that take short videos, so they are primed and ready to go with no work. Twitter does a great job of allowing sections of videos to be uploaded.
My birdbath cam takes great short images of visitors. I can also use it remotely to record sound/image, so would be great for uploads without having to do any extra processing.
https://twitter.com/kerritbareetcam
Those were great snippets of bird behavior - and such gorgeous birds!
the point is to add a video option just like how you add a photo or audio. it shouldn’t be this difficult especially for how big Inat is getting.
sound calls are not videos. We need videos
its time to add video observations. its taking too long.
Continual growth might actually make it more difficult because it raises our infrastructure costs and we need to update our database and other functionality to deal with the growth. This is not to say we don’t want more people to use iNat - we do! - but as iNaturalist doesn’t charge fees for use, nor do we sell our users’ personal information, I want to be clear that growth in use is not necessarily coupled with growth in income.
Adding the infrastructure to upload, play, and store video files, plus the user interface and design work for it, is a pretty heavy lift, and as mentioned above it’s something we want to do (I voted for this request) but we’re limited by resources, or lack thereof. In the meantime, there are workarounds involving other sites like Vimeo, YouTube, Google Photos, DropBox, etc, where you can upload videos for free and link to those in your observation (eg this observation of mine).
(we/us pronouns) If there was a storage (MB) limit per observation with the ability to use any and all media (including video), we would have lots of dynamic options. We think a short video (3 seconds) would be ideal for our footage of Flying Squirrels. Still photos from the video seem very, very poor. But the motion might be enough for an ID. We tried to download the recommended GIF maker from one of the forums, but it was too technically challenging for us to figure out, whereas shortening a video to a few seconds is something we can accomplish. Thanks.
i think inat staff knows you eventually have to make the move to invest in the video options eventually. I am just sick of getting great video (like today when i got an osprey doing a dive bomb on a fish) and not being able to upload it so i just put it on youtube instead. thanks for the conversation tim, appriciate your work.
Hello - first time posting, and adding a +1 to this feature request for video.
Is there the possibility to someday allow uploads of videos with a filesize limit? My local Biological Records Centre (https://dbrc-ors.lerc.online/) allows uploads up to 25MB in size. All videos from my camera are much larger than this, but it’s easy enough to re-encode/shrink them using something like Handbrake (or in my case, Vidcoder). Certainly much easier than creating an animated GIF!
Hi, another +1 here. Maybe this is worth revisiting in 2025?
If files were limited to 10 seconds and 10 MB that would be fine.
Here’s an observation of mine that I think would benefit from a video:
observation: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/280639430
4MB webm: https://vimeo.com/1083700835
There are drag-and-drop online converters to transform camera videos to webm so I don’t think the technical barrier for users is too high.
I upload videos to my youtube channel, copy the link and then put it in notes, that helps a lot for identification, I do it mostly for insects.
Apple now use by default on newer phones highly compressed image files (.HEIF). allowing upload of this file format would save a huge amount of space on the average jpg/png or even bmp files, which could surely then assist with provisioning for video file formats. I just checked the ones I have, and average size per video is less than 4MB. There are also potential space benefits to allow one video instead of say 5-6 jpg files for ID purposes.
You could also put a stricter limit of say 5MB per video file ?
Hi
There is nothing in that mail trail which shows or states that .HEIC format does NOT save space ? I only need to look at the size of files saved from the iPhone to see that the .HEIC sizes are usually < 1MB, hence the logical conclusion is that they must lead to space saving. Whether there are other issues with this file format is a different discussion.
Regards
I think it’s time to allow uploading strictly size-capped short video clips using modern HEVC encoding. The file size would be no larger than a standard photo and vastly superior to those clunky GIF workarounds coming straight out of the '90s )
though I would love video observations, my only concern is the amount of spam or copyrighted or straightup useless videos, thats my concern as an identifier who has seen the horrors (an exaggeration but yea 
) of CNC-like projects and stuff
I know we are to assume that ppl mean good, but in my country I often find scenery pics, pics of grass (IDed as grasshoppers by the user), etc
maybe im overthinking, let me know yalls thoughts :)
There is an option to flag inappropriate content 
yes of course !