@amybirder Or you can make a slime mold calendar next year! 
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I’ll have to get busy. I just have three, and one is probably a perpetual ‘unknown’.
But I have seen some inspiring and beautiful photo galleries. Like:
https://www.pinterest.ca/maureencotton1/slime-mould/
https://www.designswan.com/archives/beautiful-macro-photography-shots-slime-mold.html
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Hmmm. Funny you should mention that because I already photographed a really nice Red Raspberry Slime mold which would be a nice December picture for the holidays since the mold is red against a soft green background of moss…
Hmmm. I wonder what other slime molds are out there to photograph in our woods?
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No links because I used VistaPrint to make the calendar(s) and I don’t think they let other folks look at things in your account. They also delete the photos after a certain amount of time so the spiders are already gone. 
I think the birds from the 2022 calendar are already gone, too. They are rather ruthless.
I do have a website at amypadgett.com and maybe I should just create a post for the spiders that I included. That would certainly be one way. And another post for the dragonflies, etc. I’ve been bad about posting so this might set a fire under me to do better.
I’m sorry–I feel like I’ve let you down. But here is one of the spider photos (if I’m competant enough to include it)…
It’s a Basilica Orbweaver (Mecynogea lemniscata) and one of my favorites. The most beautiful spider (I think) that I’ve photographed is the Mabel Orchard Orbweaver. I love that spider. The colors are just gorgeous.
I won’t fill up this space with photos, but hopefully it will lessen the disappointment about the calendar.
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Lots of them!!! You just have to pick eleven more and your calendar is ready! 
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Naah don’t worry, I’m not disappointed, I was just being curious.
Nice orchard weavers, here where I live the genus is very common fortunately.
Yes, we have Orchard orbweavers everywhere including ou back porch so it’s pretty easy to get good photos.
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Oh that’s cool, here where I live they are always common but for some reason the boom certain times a year.
Or well trying to remember a bit, I haven’t seem them in a little while… hmmmmmmm…
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I just got this text from my twin:
“Bring the camera. There’s a funny vulture in the tree.”
(one minute later)
“NVM IT’S AN OSPREY”
(Yes, I did get pictures)
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‘‘A funny vulture’’…
I just can’t.
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Here’s the observation: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/130304547
and here’s one of the pictures at my camera’s maximum zoom level. (It’s a Canon PowerShot Elph330HS. Inherited it from my grandmother when she passed away a few years ago)
[ID: A photograph of an osprey sitting on a dead tree branch that sticks up into the air, with a grey-blue sky visible behind it. The osprey is facing to the left, turning its head to the right to look back over its shoulder. Its folded wings are black, with the rest of its body except for a stripe across its eye to the back of its head, which is black. Its dark beak is short and hooked, and its talons, where they clutch the tree branch, are large and sharp. End ID.]
:)
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What a funny vulture!
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I agree with your concerns over lost or compromised images! I have worked for about a dozen newspapers and magazines over the past 43 years and I can’t tell you how many images have been lost or ruined by those publishers. One of the newspapers I worked for started posting most of my work on their website in around 2004. It would get posted a few days before the print version arrived in most peoples mail boxes. I felt pretty secure that most of my educational material was at my fingertips and that I could share it on Facebook educational pages or other venues without having to worry about it. The images were large and the stories were there perfectly formatted for my readers to see! Perfect I thought! But the newspaper was sold a few years ago and the website revamped. In revamping they somehow lost many of the images and were only able to recover what appears to me to be enlarged thumbnail pics. This was the second time that occurred with the current ownership being the 3rd since I’ve been working there. Fortunately, I saved backups of the unedited and edited versions of all my images and will someday help them rebuild as time permits but more importantly, I still have the images (and stories) on file to use as I see fit.
The same thing occurred with a book I co-wrote. Three editions came out with all images for the most part perfect and then a 4th edition came out with many images that were sized down and/or heavily pixilated. It turned out the publisher switched to a printer in China and according to the story, could not use all our images to full advantage with their software. After talking to our publisher, my co-author and I learned we had to resubmit many of our original images or take new ones for the 5th edition!
There are other publishers I worked for such as World Coin Universe, which was absorbed by its parent company, Collectors Universe and still later shifted to the Professional Coin Grading Service Library. Many of the stories by many authors, including many of mine, were “lost” during those transitions. I also had an entire external hard-drive I used for backup go bad on me just a few months after transferring all my files to it.
I’m lucky I have saved all my hard-drives pulled from my various PCs over the years and can at least save them again to another backup.
I also save many on my server that hosts my website where I keep them in high resolution for print media or web use.
When it comes to iNat I accept the fact something could go wrong and all could be lost as remote of a possibility that could be. I’m not an educator here on iNat - just a student engaged in a hobby so my concerns about all being lost are minimal but I still save all my files for a few weeks in the event somebody asks if I have additional images to help ID an organism and then after that I try to delete all except the 1% or so of images that I really like.
To date I have lost the images to three observations here on iNat. One day I’d get up and see an observation with no images. In all three cases they were observations that had already gone to research grade (so it was clear the images had to be there to start) but there they were with zero images. In these cases I just reuploaded the images and all was fine. That’s only three observations out of over 36,000 but that’s enough for me to realize all could be lost someday and that I should save the cream of the crop somewhere else besides iNat.
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…when it frustrates you to see so few unread forum threads when you come every day.
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Saving copies of your images is both and art and science all on its own. Despite the fact that I worked in the computer industry my entire career, and like you, have kept all my hard drives, it is still a struggle.
Right now, I store all my photos on external USB drives (2 of them) and it has saved my bacon more than once, for sure.
But I have strayed off topic…
But there are certainly a lot of beautiful and amazing photos on iNaturalist. A lot of very talented and dedicated folk.
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a belated Hello 
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Gosh !
I recently blanked out and forgot my password to my encrypted onboard hard drive, which had not been backed up for 6 months (to a non encrypted external drive). Somehow after 36 hours I unblanked and managed to login
Some years earlier my original single backup of images got corrupted – I recovered tonnes of images which were originally in raw format but are now recovered badly to tiff -
A tech friend recommends continuous 3 factor back up, which is neither cheap nor easy.
I don’t trust the cloud at all. It is convenient and easy to use but I fear for it as you have highlighted. Inaturalist is awesome but I fear that they will run out of space, funding, or some “idjut” like “melon dmusk” will take it over or something.
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Actually, my avatar image is a fly which inspected my computer. Perhaps you can recognize the windows desktop symbol it is looking at…
More photos of the fly:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/52283940
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When you can’t remember what date you did something, but you remember an observation you made that day so you check that observation for the date.
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I think that has happened to me… 
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