After I mentioned to my son that I’d been seeing birds I couldn’t identify in the back yard, he gifted me a Birdfy (https://www.birdfy.com/) feeder, which takes mp4 movies of visitors. I have a few that I’d like to upload to iNaturalist, but they upload as a pretty disappointing sound file with no thumbnail. A search of the forum for “Birdfy” yielded no results. Is there anyone out there who knows how to do it?
iNaturalist doesn’t support video, but you could take stills/screenshots and share those as images.
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The best you can do is transfer 6-10 second video clips to gifs (e.g. Vid2GIF). Maximum file size 20 Mb.
That worked! Thank you! [https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/301684206]
Be aware that iNat staff have noted that future support for animated gifs is not guaranteed so they may become still images with no sound in the future. You may want to post a screenshot and audio file.
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As fun to watch as animated GIFs might be, I am in the camp that such images are annoying when posted among an array of other still images. This is probably just me, but I find them visually distracting. And while they may show a moment of behavior, for many organisms (birds, butterflies, etc.) they are much less useful for examining an organism’s field marks in detail compared to high-quality still images. The resolution of screen captures from vids is also typically lower than still images, of course depending on the equipment.
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Animated GIFs are essential for portraiture and identification of some microscopic organisms. If they go, many of my observations lose most or all of their value and credibility.
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Interesting! Could you offer links to a couple of examples?
Not that well, though. It keeps causing lag. You should screenshot from videos instead.
this has already long been the case in the Android app. i’m not sure about the new app (which is currently still iOS only).
unless there’s been a change of heart among the iNat overseers, i would never upload any new observations that incorporate animated GIFs. it’s better to upload an actual video file to another site and link to that in the observation that contains a still (and audio, as necessary).
For anyone else who was in the dark like I was, here’s a quick catch-up!
I’d never heard of this product until now (TIL) — and I regularly ID birds from Unknowns / Needs ID. So if you’re in the same boat, no worries!
The product is called Birdfy (pronounced “bird-fee”), and it’s a bird feeder with a built-in camera. It films the birds that visit and uses AI to try to ID them. It’s great to see new tech for nature ID! Basically a trail cam in your backyard, that also does some ID.
Here is a video ad that shows what it does:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz379696zfo
Try these two from the past few weeks. This observation of a flagellated amoeba allows observation of its movement, production of pseudopodia, and the presence and activity of a flagellum: https://inaturalist.ca/observations/298549013.
This is one of only two observations to date in the world in iNaturalist, of a small green algal cell that lives inside a pebbled shell. It reproduces by forming 4 daughter cells. The two halves of the clam-like shell break open, and the daughter cells grow within a gelatinous ball to produce their own cells before swimming away. The gifs show the pebbled shell, the presence and conformation of the flagella, the phototropic behaviour of the cells faced with a bright light source, the 3D structure of the cells, and the activity of the daughter cells within the gelatinous ball: https://inaturalist.ca/observations/298182626.
I believe these observations are richer for the use of gifs.
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