Hi,
I've been working with a PhD. student, collecting plants to inventory a complete flora of a natural area. We have a spreadsheet with herbarium-appropriate details of the 1003 specimens from last year. I took photos with my DSLR, and have an average of over 5 field photos per specimen. Almost all specimens have been keyed, so we're ready to upload to iNaturalist. From what I can tell, the most automated workflow would be:
1. Use a script and exiftool to get metadata into the photos -- GPS
coordinates in the appropriate fields, taxon name and everything else
as IPTC "subject" keywords
2. Crank through the web uploader,
uploading batches, manually clicking on images to group them and specify
them as single observations
I'm pretty sure I can figure out the first step, but the second step seems overly tedious and prone to error, so I'd much rather have it fully automated. I've found
similar requests, but no workflow that would avoid the manual assignment of photos to observations. Is this possible?
Alternatively, I can think of another workflow that could work well:
1. upload the observations as a csv
2. export the observations from iNaturalist as a csv (to get the iNaturalist observation numbers)
3. tag (or rename) the images with the iNaturalist observation number
4. upload all of the images
Is there any way to automatically group photos as observations when uploading?
Joe
p.s. I have seen
pyinaturalist and I think that I could potentially use that (and would use it instead of steps 3 and 4), but I was hoping for a solution not requiring another 3rd-party tool besides an exif tag editor.