I can take a camera, but the one I have doesn’t take great pictures in indoor lighting, let alone with a moving specimen. It’s a good idea though and I’ve tried it! They don’t even allow flip phones :|
It aggravates me when folks upload things to iNat from academic or survey projects that are neither ID’d nor have any real ability to be ID’d on iNat.
Dear iNatters,
It frustrates me that in the city where i am living (Amsterdam, Netherlands), species are being placed on iNat that were observed in our city’s zoo. They don’t exist or survive in the city outside the zoo’s borders. Most of the word iNaturalist is Natural so zoo observations give a false impression of the diversity/natural habitat in/of an area.
What is your opinion as iNatters of putting observations made in a zoo on the site?
obs of zoo animals (and other captive animals) are fine as long as they are marked as ‘casual’ instead of ‘research grade’ or ‘needs ID’; when an obs is casual, INat automatically excludes it from being used by other sites (like GBIF) and from the search; you can see them by unclicking the ‘verifiable’ box in the filters.
It finally snows where you live and almost immediately you get sick and are stuck in bed for several days. And the most unbearable part of it was being unable to go out and iNat in the snow. I had been really looking forward to uploading some nice bird pics!! At least I got to go out a bit today…
Ah, that’s a shame. Hope you feel better soon! In Ohio, we got over 13 inches, so there aren’t many things out aside from birds. :)
Thank you! We had something around there as well, so lots of borbs out recently! I saw so many species all fluffed in their winter outfits! It hasn’t snowed this much here in several years.
that reminds me, though similar in a sense but not the same,
My camera’s menu button does not work, it just stopped working 4-5 years ago so I basically lost 70% of the functions just like that. And then soon enough the left button on the scroll wheel ( one used to scroll through your pics ) stopped working so I can’t zoom towards the left of a particular image and also lost the timer function, and recently the scroll wheel has also stopped working so yea I just have to download the pic to inspect it properly 
Now because of this I can’t take pics the way I want usually but im making it work
my camera also runs out of battery real quick or real slow, depends on its mood and that has ruined a lot of observations
I went somewhere with my camera, prepared to do a little iNatting. I hadn’t charged it in a few days, but since I hadn’t used it much, and it had last showed that it still had a fair amount of charge, I thought it would be fine. I was wrong
Almost as soon as I got there, I saw a hawk. Now I’m still a beginner hawk identifier, and I need a good look to be able to ID. So I eagerly pulled out my camera, inserted the battery, and pointed at the hawk, who was perched at the top of a nearby tree.
The battery icon started flashing red as soon as it went on, showing up empty. Words appeared across the dark screen saying “No battery remains”
I PANICKED. This could not be happening. As far as I knew, this hawk was a lifer, and would be treated so until ID’ed. But I kept fidgeting with my camera until it died, leaving me with a perfectly posing, close-up hawk.
I ran my useless camera back to my car, and when I came back, the hawk was flying to the flat roof of the building I was standing by. Even closer. If my camera would have worked, I could have gotten an award-winning hawk photo with how close it was. Instead, I got this.
I will say, I was so thankful my mom lent me her phone. But I was so upset that my camera had suddenly and abruptly died, not only because I had lost a great photography chance, but because it signaled that my camera was even closer to the end than I thought.
I traveled two hours today to visit a favorite iNatting place. It was pretty much fully charged, and worked fine for a while. And then, after inserting the battery in again at some point for some more photos, it flashed the same screen up at me again. I spent the next several hours trying not to find lifers, but finding TONS of them anyway. Some beautiful beetles showed up at the picnic table I was dejectedly sitting at, and my camera was useless. I tried my mom’s camera, but it made my camera’s macro setting seem professional. All I got were out-of-focus blobs.
I charged it when I got back, and it seems fine for now, but I guess I need to get my new camera even sooner than I thought.
or a new battery. They do go bad.
I have noticed that that battery is failing, but the whole camera is doing poorly, so replacing the battery would only fix one of many problems (Battery is doing so badly mostly because of the loss of the on/off switch, which means that I have to insert it in and out whenever I want to take photos.)
Getting no help when asking iNat IT staff for changing incorrect location coordinates into correct ones. Just a simple Database Operation, that should not be too complicated for iNat IT experts to do. A quite a lot I did manually but I gave up. Would be incredibly happy if help would be offered.
Your advice really helped!
I usually had this issue when trying to focus on a plant in foreground with grass in the back getting focus instead.
Now, I autofocus on the ground roughly the same distance away from the smartphone-camera as the subject, lock the focus by holding down as recommended, and point at the subject to get perfectly in-focus photos.
Thank you!
I pick up trash as I walk the trails and yesterday I noticed a metallic bright green piece of litter, part of a candy wrapper maybe? I take two steps forward to pick it up and it flies away!! It was likely Cicindela sexguttata ( Six-spotted Tiger Beetle) which I have been looking forward to finding. Until next time I guess!
Edit: After posting this I was motivated to go the same spot looking again. Almost exactly 1 hour after this post one landed right on the path in front of me, not even 10 minutes after arriving. Needless to say I was excited.
I dont understand, you picked wrong locations in bulk and you want to edit them in bulk again instead of manually edit each observation and pick new correct coordinates?
you can rely on API endpoint to do such bulk corrections, better to start another general thread and explain, I am sure many will help with code if stated cleanly the issue.