OK, thank you for those additions @pisum. Reading up on your point, I see that it is claimed that “iNaturalist scales down anything larger than 2048×2048”, as per the 2023 post https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/clarification-on-photo-resizing-vs-resolution/47478 , hence I might still need to crop my movie stills a bit when it comes down to for example a butterfly far away.
And considering the dimensions above, I should just be aware that any picture which I don’t crop will result in image loss during upload.
Of course, if we take the argument against cropping further, we could also say we need to remove the limit of 20 pictures, or even allow the upload of video instead of merely pictures. I am reasoning ad absurdum now perhaps, because again, as you mentioned it comes down to a cost benefit ratio, in this case for the storage capacity and costs of iNaturalist.
Considering I am always starting from movies, the question then perhaps for me is also how to automate the extraction of sharp stills from a movie, and if even more artifically intelligent, only those stills, with a maximum of 20 stills, that show the animal of interest. Now, all or much is possible in the world of IT, but the question is how to make a user-friendly tool, or where to find one. In any case, a lot of time is still lost on manual editing, as for now. Even the aiming of my camera/lens (which is of poor bad quality again, when the object is far) is currently another manual process and thus often missing the moving target.