upload
The settings of a publish service are almost the same as a normal export from Lightroom, and you can use many of the same options.
After saving changes to the edit settings Lightroom will prompt you to re-publish all of your images. *I highly recommend not doing this*. Unfortunately there's no way for a publish plugin to stop Lightroom from showing this prompt. If you accidentally do this, you can right click images in the "Modified Photos to Re-Publish" section of the publish collection, and select "Mark as Up-To-Date".
iNaturalist will automatically downsize any image with a long edge longer than 2048 pixels, so there's no reason to export any larger than this. Choose "Resize to fit", "Long Edge", "2048" pixels, and check "Don't enlarge". Of course you may export smaller than 2048 pixels if you prefer to do that.
The recommended settings are "All Except Camera & Camera Raw Info", with "Remove Location Info" unchecked. This will upload the smallest amount of metadata to iNaturalist that includes everything that is needed for a research grade observation, without you having to manually add the metadata to the observation.
| Setting | Time | GPS | Keywords | Sample | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Copyright Only | link | ||||
| Copyright & Contact Info Only | link | ||||
| All Except Camera Raw Info | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | link | Contains more data than the next option |
| All Except Camera & Camera Raw Info | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | link | |
| All Metadata | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | link | Includes information about how the image was edited |
Note that GPS metadata is controlled by the "Remove Location Info" checkbox, so it is possible to create an export without GPS info even for the settings with a check under GPS.
You can control which metadata is exported in a more fine-grained way with Jeffrey Friedl's Metadata Wrangler plugin.
Lightroom has functionality in the map module to create private locations. When you upload images inside these private locations using this plugin, the actual image file will have no location information, but you can choose (in the settings for the publish service) to set the location on the observation that is created, and an iNaturalist location privacy setting to choose. The default for this plugin is to set the location of observations created with images in private locations to "Obscured".
To create a private location in Lightroom, open the Map module, and navigate the map to where you would like to create the private location. On the left panel, click the + next to Saved Locations, and in the dialog that pops up you can name your location, fine tune the radius, and finally ensure you check the Private checkbox. Any photos within that location will now not have their location information included during any export (not just this plugin).