Submitting the best photos for your observations

We load photos onto iNaturalist in order for the subject to be identified and for the record to be made available to others.  This means the photo (or photos as for the identification of insects, my main interest, shots from several angles are often required for specific identification) should, where possible, be sharp, correctly exposed and for the subject to be clearly visible and not hidden amongst a lot of foliage for example.

Select and adjust the size

It is also useful to make sure the images are not too large because the larger the image the more storage space is required on the server and also large images can take minutes to upload into iNaturalist.   The jpegs I produce from the RAW files are usually have the longest side set to 6,000 pixels and are anything from 6,000 KB to 30,000 KB in size and these are too big to upload.

For uploading to iNaturalist I produce smaller images and use two workflows depending on if I am travelling or not.  When travelling the images (jpegs rather than RAW files) are copied from the SD card and then are processed using the default software that comes with the laptop.  The image is cropped and the exposure is adjusted before saving the image with a longest side of 1,200 pixels and with the image quality set to 80%.  This tends to give an image size of between 100-200KB although they might be a bit larger.  These images can then be loaded directly into iNaturalist.  However, do take care and make sure the pixel number is set to 1200 and not 120 which I did once – the images loaded very quickly but were far too small to be viewed by identifiers!

Getting the best image quality

When at home all my images (RAW files) are loaded into Lightroom and I create the files for iNaturalist by exporting jpegs from Lightroom.  The workflow is similar to the above but there are a few more steps although the output settings can be set and used for a batch of exported images.

The first step is to process the images as normal and then to create a copy of the photo.  It is the copy that is then cropped to focus attention onto the main subject which is on occasion may not be the original subject of the photo but another insect that appears in the shot.  After this the sharpness level is increased to at least 75 (on the Lightroom sharpness scale).  Before exporting the image the keywords on the copied image(s) that are not relevant for identification are removed.  The images are then imported with image quality set to 60, longest side set to 1,200 pixels, “sharpen on export” set to screen and with an appropriate name.

Use the best that you have

Sometimes the images we capture are not as sharp or clear as we would like.  Where possible I do not load such images but once in a while you may have a poor shot (despite attempts to improve the image by increasing the amount of sharpening for example) that is the only shot of an interesting insect that you captured.  These I would load into iNaturalist having tweaked the image to the best of my ability but often add a comment expressing my apologies for such a poor image.

Rough-Haired Lagria Beetle - Lagria hirta - Hertfordshire