pisum
June 30, 2023, 6:32pm
9
as i understand it, there are no download limits for images hosted in the AWS Open Data bucket. below are snippets from a thread where i posed the question, and staff responded:
in the API recommended practices doc (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/api+recommended+practices ), there was an item related to media downloads:
Downloading over 5 GB of media per hour or 24 GB of media per day may result in a permanent block
i’ve always read this to apply to downloading photos. but i’m guessing this limit no longer really applies to downloading photos that are part of the AWS open data set, right?
Correct, we should update the API docs. That’s in there because we incur bandwidth charges when someone downloads images not in the new Amazon Open Data bucket. So that recommendation is meant to help avoid huge costs associated with people downloading huge volumes of photos. That will still apply to people downloading photos not in the open data bucket (unlicensed photos) but we will no longer get charged bandwidth costs when someone downloads from the open data bucket. It will be nice to no longer have to give this mixed messaging around using iNat data (e.g. please use our data for your research / please don’t download our data because we can’t afford it!) and instead just enthusiastically point researchers to this bucket and the associated metadata.
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