Please don’t hesitate to share this with the takers of the photos you are having trouble with. For me, this is a long slow learning process. I just upgraded my phone for more zoom. I could have bought a camera for that amount, but a camera requires different skills and I want to maximize my abilities with this tool first. But aside from that, the comments I most appreciate are when people say - you need a good head shot to ID that insect, or something in that line. I have a file of those comments that I am trying to learn from.
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I can’t do that on my mobile device (not the app; the actual website). My workaround is that I first upload the picture that I want to be the first, then I select “add media,” and upload more pictures; then, I choose “select all”; selecting “combine” then combines them, defaulting to using the one at top left (the one I uploaded separately first) as the first one.
Subfamily Chichorioideae. I wonder how many are stuck at subfamily because someone photographed only the generically dandelion-like flower and somehow managed not to have anything else visible.
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Cichorioideae when you are lucky. These plants are often IDed as Taraxacum officinale as default, whichever genus or species they actually are.
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Amen! I call them, “dotumentaries”.
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Sometimes when I upload a photo, I know it has very poor quality, and I don’t necessarily care if it is IDed or not. The reason being is that I’m trying to map species I know are in my area of interest but getting a picture of them is often very challenging. Birds are especially frustrating; so, if you see a blurred spot of color and I’ve called it a violet-green swallow or a western tanager, I might not care what anyone else thinks, I just want it uploaded onto iNaturalist for the sake of the list.
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That’s fine of course. I’ve added a few records myself that have NO photo so that I could keep track of the date/location of my observation – these remain Casual.
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I’ve seen casual-grade observations used to track things like potted plants sprouting and growing. Does anyone ever check these non-verified/casual grade observations as a kind of interesting data set and reach out to observers if there’s anything unusual there?
I like to look through my local area’s casual observations to get a sense of what’s popular in commercial landscaping. I’d like to say there’s a more noble reason for doing this, but I mostly do it to avoid those odd situations where my spouse points to something and I tell her I’m not sure what it is.
Anecdotally, here’s what’s popular in my area:
I’m sure there’s some debate about whether such plants are really interacting with nature, maybe in topic: Relevance of cultivated species observations, but if they get new people using iNat, I think that’s great.
I think learning to appreciate tiny, barely visible flowers, like with Veronica arvensis or natives, is a later stage of nature appreciation.
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I use a 5-6 year old Android phone to take my photos and upload them using the application. I do everything else on the website on a 7-8 year old Chromebook.
I have no idea if my photos are “good” or “bad” and I have no idea what metadata is but I thought I would say how the application works for me as far as ordering photos. I tend to go into my garden a few times a day (weather dependent) and when I do I take photos of everything and then come back inside and sit down to upload from my phone from my photo gallery. If there is for example a bee, the first photo I select in the gallery of the bee becomes the first photo in the observation, however I select as many photos of the bee as I like, paying close attention to the order in which I select them. If I have two extremely similar shots, I will select them in a row. I hit “share” and my phone prompt for which application and I select iNaturalist. My photos appear in the application in the order selected. I then add location. I go back into the photos and crop within the application if necessary (I think from this thread this is terrible, but it works for me). I look for the similar shots and select the better of the two and delete the other. Finally I ask for selections of what type of bee it is, select how I want to call it, then upload the observation.
My phone automatically returns me to my gallery, and I move onto the next photo / group of photos I wish to share and repeat the process. Sometimes I start at the first thing I observed during my garden foray, sometimes the most recent, but the order in which I select the photos within the gallery is the order in which the photos appear within the observation. What has specifically changed since I joined iNaturalist/Naturalista is that on both the Android applcation and the website, as accessed on Chromebook (again, ancient but updated), I no longer have the ability to reorder photos within an observation. So while I used to just select photos and then reorder them, now I very much pay mind the order in which I select the photos in the gallery before uploading. (I’m not complaining – I’m fully capable of finding a workaround.)
Lagerstroemia indica seeds are eaten by birds (goldfinches seem to love them). I also see them spread to wooded areas nearby. Sounds like interacting to me.
Edit: I’ve seen this where I have lived in southern Louisiana and southeast Texas.
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Interesting and neat! I didn’t think about nature interacting with captive/cultivated species when I wrote that, more the hostility(?) that is somewhat expressed towards non-native plants and shows up in that topic.
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A good chunk (maybe a third?) of my local species list is from my backyard and local garden centres! Weeds and ‘garden pests’ have been redefined this summer since starting iNat. But it’s a great point. If cultivated and non-native stuff interacts with wild stuff, it still interacts, right?
(Does this mean I should try to identify what’s in my wild seed bird feeder mix?)
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Those same hostile people would be undernourished if they had no access to non-native plants. We aren’t hunter-gatherers anymore, and we can’t be in the present-day world.
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People hate non-native species, even though it’s humans who brought them, read what people say about European birds in NA, they have such a hatred for House Sparrow, while Tree Sparrow (true one, not american bunting) isn’t hated in the area they live now in NA, while really they’re so similar, but for some reason common introduced species is hated and uncommon are seen as something unique and beautiful, it’s hypocritical.
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Friendly reminder to please keep the thread on topic (cropping/processing photos and importance for IDing, etc.)
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If the image is too small on your screen, use zoom. If the problem is data being degraded by iNaturalist, preserve the original files—or fix iNaturalist. In both cases, there’s a good solution, and cropping is not it.
Actually, it can be. Zooming doesn’t add detail if there are only a limited amount of pixels in the zoomed in area. It just gets blurry.
The 2048 long pixel max dimension in the iNat process is certainly workable, and affordable (imagine how many new servers would be needed to store all submitted images at full resolution!), but it would work much better if we try to pre-crop submissions containing small critical ID detail within that cap before submitting to upload.
It would really help IDers if users understood why and how best to work within that pixel max limit.
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IMO, a default “discard data that would be useful to IDers” policy is just a mistake. I get it, sservers and bandwidth aren’t free, but trying to cajole people into a kluged workaround is fundamentally not a good way to resolve a conflict between organizational policies and user group interests.
Maybe we should advocate a more subversive kluge, instead. I bet there are some free image tile generators. Just convert all the full resolution images to sets of 2048 x 2048 tiles before upload. :-)
Or, less nefariously, if iNat wanted to get money from me, a “subscription required for access to full resolution images” model would probably work. I’m not averse to putting my time and resources toward solving problems, but asking people to spend time on a workaround instead of fixing the problem is just not appealling.
From what people were saying, bandwidth is free. https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/49564-inaturalist-licensed-observation-images-in-the-amazon-open-data-sponsorship-program/
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