One of the downsides of being a naturalist is that a single walk through the local forest can mean spending hours sorting through and deleting photos.
If you use a camera to shoot RAWs and then edit them and export them and whatnot, everything can quickly become a mess and then you suddenly have 40000 photos and don’t know what to do and you delete all your music and audiobooks to make room for more photos and good luck finding that one specific one of the cool lichen from Sweden you took back in 2019…
So… I wanted to ask you: Do you have a method to deal with all the photos you take? Do you use special programs/apps? Do you keep your RAW files, do you delete them? What about non-iNat photos?
Please just share a bit about your process.
Some on my blog, some on iNat - both of which can be found easily.
On my laptop I can find that hike or holiday.
But the backlog needs sorting and deleting!
I just bought the second USB 1 TB SSD a couple of months ago.
I load photos in a temp folder by device, delete the blurry ones, duplicate and crop, adjust light/contrast/saturation etc. After adding observations to iNat and reviews to Google maps, I store them in folders by device/year/month.
I heard that some 2 TB SSD are unreliable, do your research before buying any.
Lol,I rarely do such a thing unless my phone is near-full capacity. Which happens once a month, considering I’ve taken more that 400 photos in one day (There was a jacana, ok? And ducks. And damselflies. And butterflies. And… well…). I delete the blurry ones, but I prize my 18 identical photos of a single bird ,and leave them rotting in some hard disk. So… yeah, if the photos REALLY good, I edit it and fav it. But nothing else. Should I stop hoarding these like there’s no tomorrow? Yeah… But will I? Definitely not!
I don’t shoot RAW, between 30000 frames a year and a full time job I just don’t have the time.
Once I retire, I will get a DSLR and spend more time on taking photos just for fun, that I’ve neglected a bit since joining iNat. Until then I just use M to feel like a photographer :)
My cellphone pics get automatically backed up to a Flickr account where they are stored for non-public use. Camera pics get moved to an external storage drive or two, each about 1 terabyte capacity. All as JPGs.
I keep everything always dreaming that one day I will go through and delete all the blurry or duplicates. I have my camera set to take 3 shots at a time so you can imagine one hiking trip yields an excessive amount of pictures most of which are either slightly darker or slightly lighter duplicates or blurry unusable pictures.
I almost wish there was an app that could sort through my pictures and only keep the best ones and delete the rest for me.
Google Photos will kind of do this, it’s sorts them and stacks similar or duplicate pictures together and only shows what they pick out as the best picture (which isn’t always the best) and gives you the option of keeping that one and deleting the rest. I don’t trust its AI so I still go through them individually.
I also have an Instagram account where I post a lot of my pictures, but mostly as stories.
I delete them, often very quickly after upload, to remember to do so. I keep only a few really good photos. Like nice insects macros, you know, stuff i might want to look at later.
I mostly delete mine once they are uploaded. They’re just snapshots to document the observation. I’ll have an easier time finding them on iNat by date, location, and/or taxa.
If I have taken the trouble to make a photo worth keeping, it gets stored on an external drive. That is copied to another drive for storage off-site. Mostly sorted by date into folders. Some folders are years or seasons. Additional subfolders may exist for special events. Most images are jpgs but a few are RAW.
The best photos are kept in a dated folder, and I’m quite harsh with which photos get pruned and which survive. The photos stay locally as I’m too paranoid to leave them on iNaturalist alone, though it is often easier to find them that way! The folders are YYYY/MM/DD, as the number of folders is growing I have considered lumping them as YYYY/MM, but it’s working ok for now.
I try to sort/crop/upload the same day, or the next day, as I don’t have GPS on the camera. For that reason, on longer trips I tend to also make observations from the phone to help match them up.
The very best photos also get copied to my phone to share with friends/families/strangers, naturally.
All photos are JPEG - I would like to learn RAW, but I haven’t yet reached the limits of my equipment, so I will learn my craft before giving myself any additional software or storage headaches.
I shoot raw, but I avoid burst unless shooting something flying subjects. I sort through them, adjust exposure, crops and save to jpg. Unless it’s a really good picture, I usually just delete them after uploading to iNat.
Depending on the walk I end up with 40-300 files to review.
It depends on the photo quality and also how interesting I find the picture. Sometimes I have really nice photos I want to keep. I tend to delete most of my photos, though, since they’re already serving their purpose on iNat.
On a walk I can take usually around 100-200 jpeg photos with my canon camera and then I insert them to computer and take around 1 hour to edit and upload to Inaturalist and then I delete all photos from camera and computer.
I follow the late great Greg Lasley’s method - or at least what he told me he does when I talked with him: I ruthlessly delete photos unless they’re really good (a rarity) or are special to me in some way (a cool trip, a neat encounter, etc). Otherwise, they’re gone after they get put on iNat.
always dreaming that one day I will go through and delete all the blurry or duplicates. I have my camera set to take 3 shots at a time 
so you can imagine one hiking trip yields an excessive amount of pictures most of which are either slightly darker or slightly lighter duplicates or blurry unusable pictures.