Research-Grade Photos on iNaturalist: How to Find Them and How to Use Them

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but it can be challenging to find accurately identified photos of organisms that are also free to use. Fortunately, the photos in some 170 million research-grade observations uploaded by citizen scientists on iNaturalist make for a trustworthy source of photos of plants and animals in their natural environment. What’s more, the platform has easy-to-interpret information about how you can use each photo and how you should cite the photographer.

What is iNaturalist?

iNaturalist is a crowdsourced species identification system and an organism occurrence recording tool. In other words, it’s ordinary people helping each other and building community while learning and sharing knowledge about biodiversity.

The observations recorded by these citizen scientists are used in thousands of scientific publications. This is possible because iNaturalist has a process for assessing the quality of the observations. Of around 270 million total observations, this process has identified about 170 million as “Research Grade.” (see How are iNaturalist data used for research?; What is the Data Quality Assessment and how do observations qualify to become “Research Grade”?).

How do I limit my search to only research-grade observations?

Go to https://inaturalist.org in your web browser.
Click “Explore” in the top navigation bar.
Click the “Filters” button to restrict the search results.
1. Check “research grade,” “has photos,” and any other filters you want to apply.
2. Under “More Filters,” you can limit the place to Florida.
3. Select “Creative Commons license” to exclude copyrighted material with no license for reuse.
4. Click “Update Search” to close the window.
Enter the species name to search. The screen shows the Florida filter and that two additional filters are applied.

How can I tell if I can use a photo on iNaturalist?

It’s important to understand the different licensing options users can choose when sharing their photo in order to determine whether or not you can use it.

The default license for all photos uploaded to iNaturalist is the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license (CC-BY-NC). This license allows anyone to re-use the licensed work for any non-commercial purpose, so long as they credit the copyright owner.

BUT users can choose to retain complete legal control over copies of their photos. On the other hand, they can select a different version of the Creative Commons license that is less restrictive, or even waive their copyright entirely.

You will need to know the license type for each photo you use, and also how you should credit the copyright owner.

How do I find the license and citation information?

On an observation page, you’ll see two symbols at the bottom of each photo. The symbol on the left will either be CC or C. These indicate that the photo has a Creative Commons license (CC) or that the contributor retained full copyright (C).

If a photo has a Creative Commons license (CC), it means that you will be able to use it under certain conditions. Clicking on the CC symbol will show the specific CC license and link to an explanation of the license. For more information, see Can I use the photos and sounds that are posted on iNaturalist?

Copy the citation information and the link to the page for use in your photo credit. Use the exact wording provided. You can add “(via iNaturalist)” after the name of the person. So the credit for this image would be “© Fran Meyerson (via iNaturalist), some rights reserved (CC BY-NC-ND)”

How can I get permission to use photos that do not have a Creative Commons license?

If the photo has no license (C), you will have to obtain explicit permission from the user who posted the photo. See How can I contact a user on iNaturalist? Can iNaturalist contact them for me? for information about contacting iNaturalist users.

Note that you must have an iNaturalist account and have made three observations or identifications before you can send a message to another user.

Keep a copy of the permission for your records.

How can I learn more about iNaturalist?

Check out these publications about iNaturalist on Ask IFAS: