Using iNat in foreign Countries

Hello,
I have a trip to Costa Rica planned for the end of May. I am studying up and planning my days now so any advice or tips would be appreciated. Will I have any issues with using the website or the app in a foreign country?

Hello, I haven’t been to Costa Rica, but I have used iNat in 8 countries on 3 continents so far and have never experienced any issues. I don’t think iNat is blocked in any country since it’s totally apolitical.
The only small issue I have to remember while traveling is to change the time zone in my camera, otherwise the time of observations may be wrong.
Enjoy your trip and hopefully you’ll have a lot of amazing observations! :)

2 Likes

Even if you do have problems with internet connection, I believe the app works offline just fine. You’ll just have to wait until you get connection again in order to upload and use the AI for ID’s.

3 Likes

I never use the mobile app, so my strategy, whether it be for the day, a road trip, or a trip to Costa Rica, has been to try to take decent notes regarding locality and other details that relate to my obs/photos. Making sure that your metadata timestamp on the camera is set helps a lot. Then I match up the details and upload everything from my laptop once I’m back home. I always want to sort and tidy up the images before uploading anyhow. I can usually figure out precisely where I was from satellite imagery, but dropping some lat/longs from a GPS into my notes definitely helps in certain habitats and locations.

2 Likes

When I travel, always lost my phone, so my advice would be that, at the end of each day, upload photos to the cloud, whatever you have.

2 Likes

I use a cheap handheld GPS and sync the track at the end of the day with the photos in lightroom. It works really well unless I forget to change time zones in my camera.

The only issues I’ve seen people talk about is loading the maps in mainland China, probably because google is blocked there

2 Likes

There are no foreign countries.

9 Likes

Cuba also gave problems with maps…and in Italy i got an iNat italian interface

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.