Description of need:
For Australian species with few sightings and images it would be useful to have access to images on ALA. For example I was wanting to revise the page for Cerealces scutellata. We have no iNat obs of this species but there is a sighting from Canberra based NatureMapr that appears on ALA. When you go into âChoose Photos For This Taxonâ, the options are, RG Observations, Observations, Flickr, EOL and Wikemedia Commons.
Feature request details:
Addition of other regional options for observation image from other platforms that contain share alike media.
Iâm not intimate with all the background details, but aiui, ALA stopped accepting direct submissions some years ago when it started running a federated inat instance at inaturalist.ala.org.au, and directed people to submit via inat instead.
Clearly it is still aggregating from other sources too - but with a clean hierarchy as it being a secondary source aggregator.
That would start to get a bit tangled if inat stopped being a purely âprimary sourceâ - ie. following the chain in this example, an observation gets submitted to NatureMapr, then second sourced by ALA, then imported from there to inat, creating a record which ALA would then want to import back from inat again âŚ
I sympathise with the problem of not having taxon images for cases where images exist but inat doesnât yet have any direct obs - but this might be something to chat with ALA staff about, since they also directly admin an inat instance.
a valid concern, but this requested functionality wouldnât involve the records themselves coming into iNat from the ALA (which had in turn come from elsewhere), but rather just the photos for display in taxon page galleries. The photos would remain âorphanedâ and not associated with any actual record in iNat
Ah cool, I thought Iâd come across some âorphanedâ images here before, but wasnât clear on how that worked. Iâm definitely all for maximising the benefits of freely licenced records. I just know how hard to untangle things can quickly get if you let them get circular.
I wonder if whatâs wanted for this then is a more generic import interface rather than special casing every possibly useful sourceâŚ
Youâd give it something like a URL to the image you want, a URL to the page/record the image was found on and/or where its licence to be used is declared, and maybe a standard checkbox where the person doing the import confirms the licence conditions in an inat standard way.
Again using this case as an example, the âbestâ solution would seem to be to import it directly from the NatureMapr primary record as ALA did, and have the ability to do so from any other similar site too.
That might be a function thatâs only available to curators, who know how to confirm acceptable licencing and reputable sources - with a ârequest a curator addâ form that the rest of us mere mortals can be trusted to use to hint at desirable external images on the rare(r) occasions we might need that?
Youâll see in this instance it has no default photo. When You click on the âAdd One Nowâ the options are, RG Observations, Observations, Flickr, EOL and Wikemedia Commons. Iâm simply requesting access for ALA. This would preferably be an option if the user is logged in via https://inaturalist.ala.org.au
Consideration could also be given for other regional sources when logged in to matching regional iNaturalist gateways.
Iâm currently helping to review and update the iNat data set for Australian Pergidae, specifically focused on sub-family Perginae at the moment. In some cases, such as the one above images are lacking. Access to ALA images would be of great assistance
When Iâm researching and donât find anything on iNat I may go to ALA and have a look there. But ALA is already populated, getting profile images on iNat is manual so it would only get images from a small number of species of special interest to someone. Also not sure of a huge advantage of being able to show images of unrecorded species for the amount of programming that I think would be involvedâŚ