just curious: iNaturalist allows you to attach photos and sounds to your observations. why not videos? i get that videos take up a lot of storage, but couldn’t there be an option at least to link videos that are hosted on a third-party site like YouTube? are videos harder to moderate? is there some …

Last thing I can find from staff in a quick search was from 2017: @michael_bear : does iNat have any plans to accept video data, ie: short clips? I know you accept audio. @loarie : No immediate plans given our current operating budget. But I think there’s interest if there were resources to take …

As somewhat of an alternative you can upload short GIFS :) See this project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/animated-observations

yes, i know it’s possible to upload animated GIF files, but i’m wondering more about actual videos. i’m not necessarily advocating that iNaturalist should start hosting a bunch of videos because i know that comes with a bunch of technical / financial hurdles. but why not create a separate new video…

When your Explore or Identify search result set includes a lot of observations that have GIFs as their #1 image, the loading can be significantly longer, which is an issue for some that have slower connections. Whenever I show iNatters that they can upload GIFs, I always recommend making GIFs the se…

I share your concerns about slogging through unedited videos, but the same thing could be accomplished by allowing actual video formats and limiting their runtimes to just a few seconds and perhaps resolution as well to encourage focused cropping. And then the file sizes wouldn’t be as huge as gifs …

Is it possible to embed videos into text fields using HTML code?

I just tried it with iframes and object tags in the description, but inat strips them out.

I think it might be best to focus discussion about the possibility of uploading videos to observations in a single place, so I moved some of the recent posts to that topic: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/upload-videos/5426 For reference here, this is what the iNat staff had said in response to the…

Videos for observations

General

Topic		Replies	Views
Platform to add video type observations General	10	590	March 5, 2025
Some videos allowed? General	12	629	October 26, 2022
Upload videos Feature Requests web , android-app , under-review , mobile-app	42	8472	June 4, 2026
Embed media by pasting a URL to the media (e.g. from YouTube) Feature Requests declined	35	3620	August 20, 2024
How to convert a video so it can be posted on iNat? General	20	2095	April 26, 2024

Videos for observations

Related topics