Why I Built iNat Publish Pro
I’ve been a naturalist photographer for ten years. My life list has over 2,000 species on it. My Lightroom catalog has tens of thousands of images.
For most of that decade, the problem wasn’t file organization. It was metadata. My iNaturalist profile had careful species data, but Lightroom was full of broad keywords like “bird” and “flower,” or nothing at all.
The manual process didn’t scale: open a browser, find the matching observation, copy species name, jump back to Lightroom, paste, repeat for hundreds of photos from a single trip.
So I built iNat Publish Pro.
It’s a Lightroom Classic plugin that syncs iNaturalist observation data directly into your catalog: species names, full taxonomy, GPS coordinates, and research-grade status. It matches photos to observations using timestamp and GPS proximity, then writes structured metadata where it belongs.
iNat Publish Pro is the first product from inat-tools, and more tools are on the way for naturalist photographers and citizen scientists who care about both science and craft.