How to get your own photos into Earth Gacha

More than 70% of the cards in Earth Gacha come from observations uploaded by iNaturalist users. That means if you photograph a wild insect or a weed by the road and upload it as described below, it can become a card that someone else pulls, and a data point that scientists can use.

The whole path

1. You photograph a living thing in the wild and upload it to iNaturalist.
2. Other members of the community help identify it, and the observation reaches Research Grade.
3. Every week, iNaturalist exports eligible Research Grade observations to GBIF.
4. Once GBIF has published it, your observation is in the pool that every Earth Gacha pack draws from.

Step 1: take a useful photo

• Photograph wild things: pets, zoo animals and plants someone planted in a garden get marked as captive or cultivated and can’t reach Research Grade. A weed that came up on its own by the road is fine.
• Get it sharp, take a few: for insects, shoot the back and the side; for plants, the flowers, the leaves and the whole plant; for mushrooms, the cap and the gills. Identifiers need to see the features to get to species.
• Keep the time and place: with location turned on, phone photos carry the date and coordinates, and the upload reads them automatically.

Step 2: upload to iNaturalist

Create an account on the iNaturalist website or app, start a new observation, add your photos, check the date and place, and enter your best guess at what it is. If you have no idea, a broad group like “insects” or “plants” is fine, and the app will suggest names based on the photo.

Mind the license: iNaturalist’s default observation license is CC BY-NC, which is exactly what the export needs, so you don’t have to change anything. Only observations licensed CC0, CC BY or CC BY-NC are exported to GBIF. If you switch to “all rights reserved”, the observation won’t reach GBIF, and so won’t show up in the game.

Step 3: reach Research Grade

According to iNaturalist’s own help pages, an observation needs:

• an accurate date;
• accurate coordinates;
• photos or sounds;
• to not be of a captive or cultivated organism, or of a human;
• community agreement on the identification: more than 2/3 of identifiers agreeing on the same species (or a lower rank).

Your own identification counts as one vote, so you usually need at least one other person to agree. Common species often get identified within days; less popular groups can take a long time. You can help by identifying other people’s observations too. That’s how the community works.

Step 4: wait for GBIF

iNaturalist generates data for GBIF once a week, and GBIF tries to ingest it about once a week. On November 2, 2026 the “iNaturalist Research-grade Observations” dataset on GBIF held 170,433,798 records. Once it’s published, your observation appears on GBIF with your name and license, and when Earth Gacha shows it, it credits you, shows the license and links back to your original observation.

What are the odds someone pulls yours?

Honestly, for any single observation the odds of a particular player pulling it are small: the pool holds 224 million records. But two things are worth knowing:

• Yours might be the rare card: a UR in the game is a species with fewer than 50 records worldwide. Photograph a small insect carefully somewhere that few people record, such as much of the tropics and Asia, and your upload may well be one of only a few records of that species, maybe even a new version of a UR card. See how rarity works.
• It genuinely helps science: GBIF data is used in a huge amount of research on where species live, how invasive species spread and how climate change is moving things around. One well-identified observation from a place few people visit is worth far more than yet another Mallard in a city park.

Other platforms

Besides iNaturalist, Observation.org (45.75 million photographed observations on GBIF) and the plant identification app Pl@ntNet (2.59 million) also share observations with GBIF. Each has its own rules, so check their documentation.