Getting started: Make observations from photos

There are a few ways to create observations from photos in iNaturalist.

1. Bulk upload from your hard drive:
   Use the Observation Photo Uploader at
   http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/upload
   (Or navigate there by mousing-over your username menu at the top right, click on Add under Observations, and click on From Photos at the top right.)

First, select your best (most diagnostically useful) photo of each specimen -- that's only one photo for each specimen -- and import them. Each photo becomes an observation. The timestamp, location (lat., lon.), and species/taxon are read from the photo file if they are included in the metadata. You can fill in any missing data or correct anything that was misinterpreted during the upload.

Then to add more photos to an observation, View that observation and click on "Add more photos" below the photo. For example, one such observation page is:
http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/2977459

1. Import from Flickr, Google Photos, Facebook, etc:
   Go to your username menu at the top right at click on Account.
   Under "Connected Accounts" at the top right, pick your photo sharing service and grant iNaturalist permission to access your photos. You have to do this part only once.
   Then go to the Import Observations page (which is also in your top-right username menu):
   http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/import

2. Upload from your smartphone:
   Download and install the free iNaturalist app (iOS or Andriod).
   Log into your iNat account in the app.
   Create observations one by one by selecting photos from your device, entering an ID (even if it's a coarse one like Lepidoptera or Insecta), and uploading the completed observation.

To qualify for the Jug Bay Moth Monitoring project, the observation must have a location within a Jug Bay natural area, a date, a photo, and an ID within Phylum Arthropoda.

If your camera does not put location info in your photo files, then after you've created your observations, you can use the Batch Edit feature to add a common location to many observations at once.
To do this, go to the Your Observations page by clicking on the top-right username menu, and click on Observations. The Batch Edit button is at the top of the page.

Select the observations whose location you want to set.
Click Edit Selected at the top.
Open the yellow Batch Operations box at the top.
Click on the text box in the third column, and you can enter the location.
Click the Apply button below that 3rd column text box, and then scroll down and click on Save All.

Posted on April 19, 2016 11:46 PM by treichard