gcwarbler's Journal

We're just back from a 2-1/2-week Panama vacation that included a week-long birding visit to the Canopy Tower (Panama), a 4-day stay at Mount Totumas Cloud Forest Reserve (Chiriquí), and several days with friends in Alto Quiel on the outskirts of Boquete (Chiriquí). As my "teaser" uploads suggest, we encountered an amazing array of biodiversity.

Now comes the task of uploading the bulk of observations from about 5,200 photos and dozens of song recordings. I have no idea at present how many species I documented, much less how many of them were new to me (probably 80 to 90%). Like I've said many times, with apologies to Mark Twain, "Travel is Taxonomically Broadening". I'm going to create some links below which should point to various sets of the existing and upcoming uploads from this foray into the Neotropics. The output from these links will burgeon over the next few weeks (and months?) as I continue to upload.

All 2024 Panama observations
Mammals from 2024 Panama visit
Birds from 2024 Panama visit
All insects from 2024 Panama visit
Butterflies from 2024 Panama visit
Moths from 2024 Panama visit
Hemiptera from 2024 Panama visit
Beetles from 2024 Panama visit
Flowering plants from 2024 Panama visit
ALL of my Panama observations ever

Geeking Out on the Upload Process
I'm still trying to think through how I want to attack this mountain of stuff. There are a couple of pathways and there are upsides and downsides to each. (As an aside, I was paranoid about losing my photos, so I ended up AirDropping all iPhone photos and copying my two SD cards from the Canons to my laptop every night and also periodically offloading the entire set of images from there to a 32-gig thumbdrive.) For some technical reasons, I ended up taking the vast majority of my plant and mothing images with my iPhone 14, the latter with a new Xenvo clip-on lamp (Glowclip Mini from their Pro Lens Kit). The iPhone images provide sufficient, if not perfect, detail on most plants and moths if I don't have to dig deep into taxonomic keys, and the iPhone-Xenvo combination is much more convenient to use than my long-trusted point-and-hope Canon PowerShot cameras. I used the latter, particularly my Canon SX740 SX, for most butterfly and bird photography. For the iPhone photos, I can (and do) upload images directly to iNaturallist from within the iNat app. That's a pretty good option but with my clumsy fingers, it's quite tedious to add any comments to observations at upload in the iOS version of the app. Another issue with the iOS uploads is that, although the locations are carried forward in the metadata at upload, there seems to be no way on the iPhone to modify the automatic placenames added by the iPhone (probably placenames from Apple maps), and these are often generic (state-level) or misleading. The only way to modify them after upload is to get on the website on my computer and edit the location names and that involves a lot of tedious post-processing.

The other basic option for upload is to work from the copies of all my photos which I've now downloaded to my laptop, using the website uploader. This is more akin to my traditional upload pathway and I like it because I have more tools on the computer for any editing and cropping of images (e.g. within Preview, iPhoto, or even Photoshop if needed). The major drawback for working with the laptop versions of the images (which I assume, for instance, are true and faithful copies off the iPhone), is that for some reason the locations for iPhone photos are lost when I AirDrop them to the laptop. That's a major glitch because it then requires me not only to manually add the locations, but to remember where every image was taken! Once again, that adds a lot of tedious effort at upload on the iNat website, even if done in batch mode. Some of these glitches may relate to the fact that I'm working on an older laptop with an outdated OS but at present I can't upgrade or update any further, so I'm stuck with what I have. I may try to attach my iPhone directly to the laptop (by cord) and see if a download bypassing AirDrop will retain the photo locations. I'll be experimenting with all of that today. [Update: I tried to connect my iPhone 14 to the old laptop and my desktop computer but neither has a recent enough OS version that is compatible with the offload process. Sigh...]

If anyone has some advice on these two alternatives or some other pathway, I'll be eager to hear about it. Thanks!