I often download and use inaturalist images for work, it would be great if we could have the option to download images with a watermark with attribute and copywrite information.
It would make it much easier to use CC-BY and related images, the systems I use make it hard to include attribution information in the appropriate place.
I am personally not a fan of image watermarks with information (they aren’t accessible for one thing). But I like the general idea of making the attribution info easier to access. A button like Wikipedia/Wikimedia has that copies formatted citation/license/attribution info would be very nice and could meet this need to some extent.
It seems like adding a watermark would be considered modification of the image, which would exclude all images with an ND clause as part of the CC license.
I do support making it easier for image users to copy attribution information, but I don’t know if a watermark is the best way to do it.
I would like to stress that it would be great to make the attribution info/ license as easy as possible to access - that would to lead to less wrong attributions - a lot of forums use Inaturalist images, and while they are in many cases selected individually, they might also be selected semi-automatically, and not rarely with the wrong attributions. (Here an example, where the stated license is CC-BY-SA on the forum that uses the photo, while originally it was CC-BY-NC).