Thats pretty much what my zoomed in iphone bird pics look like. It seems for birds such quality photos can still be identifiable in general.
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My main though on these type of observations is that there potentially will be users with more knowledge on what features to look for to provide a sufficient-enough ID, so not entirely useless. One can comment on the observation giving suggestions on what sort of things to photograph for next time.
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we really shouldn’t be bringing in specific gripes about spcific users here. I’m not a forum mod any more, but it’s definitely against the rules.
Also… for some species i’d be able to identify something of that blurriness yes. Like the white pine i mentioned earlier. Not that particular species, but maybe someone could. The observer thought they could.
This too. It seems like the moderators aren’t here, but in the past this would have all been flagged as inappropriate.
I think you were justified marking 'no further ID possible" on the observation you mentioned, the issue is complaining about the other user and saying they ‘thwarted’ you just by using the site as it is intended to be used. People are allowed to reject community ID.
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Some folks can’t afford a great camera, I think people on here forget that.
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And like @sedgequeen said, I’ve seen some amazing photos that were not identifiable. One guy posted a great shot of a bee’s face, but no other part of the body was visible, and therefore, from an ID standpoint, it might as well have been a smartphone from ten feet away.
However, it was much more enjoyable from my standpoint to look at that shot than the ten-feet-away-with-a-smartphone shot.
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Unfortunately I’ve had to submit a few blurry observations myself… while I usually don’t expect them to get to RG, recording an additional sound (if it’s vocalizing) is really helpful.
Like here https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/131264441
Or here https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/128450795
yes, and some people have disabilities where they can’t ‘get out of the car’ and walk across rugged terrain, and they should be able to participate also.
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Agreed. Everyone that wants to should be a part of the joy of nature.
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As a major contributor of unidentified observations, I did a little experiment. It is probably too early to be certain as to the value of roadside observations from far away (and blurry), but a brief summary can be found here. (if you are interested in s African trees).
https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/73616-roadside-tree-survey-summary
I just wish to make a point about the suggestion that if after four years there is no improvement, then mark it as casual.
If that was the case then almost all our herbaria specimen data would be marked as “casual” - the average return time on a revision for a popular group is 50-100 years, and some groups have never been revised since being described in the 1800s. Yes, curators will identify new specimens, but often curators hardly know most of the families and make dreadful decisions, which never get checked until the next revision. Why this sudden infatuation with rapid turn-around times? Like wine and xxxxx, sometimes one needs to wait decades for a mature response. If you want instant gratification use Facebook. But if you want to contribute something that is valuable and of interest for more than week or two, then you need to have a longer term expectation for return on your investment.
And as observations on iNat grow rapidly, expect the constant, non-growing experts, specialists and fanatics to be overwhelmed and the time to ID and confirmation and re-evaluation to increase: at least until we turn to AI to help reduce the load and clear the backlog of observations needing a meaningful ID (to below family anyway).
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Also not everyone has a decent camera.
Good points.
As a side note, it’s worth also keeping in mind that the photos in observations were not always taken intentionally for iNat, so it wouldn’t be true to assume ‘awful’ photos are always the result of laziness or sloppiness. After I first joined iNat, I started going back through and uploading my photos from trips over the past 25 years because I’ve always photographed flora and fauna and there’s lots of useful data in there.
Of course, on these trips I took many shots of other things too, but many of those also happened to include flora or fauna by chance. For instance, a picture of a mountain might include a tree in the foreground; or a photo of my friend at the seafront might by chance also include a seabird standing on a nearby rock. I cropped these photos to the relevant part – tree or seabird or whatever – and uploaded to iNat.
Obviously quite often these subjects, not being the intended subject of the photo, are often a bit distant, out of focus or half cropped off. But in most cases, so long as the photos were sufficiently ok enough to have a reasonable chance of being identifiable, I put them on iNat. Of course, if I could turn back time, I’d go back and take those photos way better, but in the absence of that option I figured it is still useful data worth sharing. In fact it’s arguably even more useful because these ‘old’ observation are from a pre-iNat era when there aren’t many records and so any data at all, even with low quality photos, adds very valuable information as to the presence of a species at that place and time.
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Hey folks, I edited a couple of posts to remove links to specific observations that were being singled out in a potentially negative light, per the forum guidelines:
Don’t post specific examples of negative iNaturalist behavior. The Forum isn’t for calling out specific users.
Those who self-posted their own observations weren’t affected. If the users whose observations were linked by others want to give their permission to restore them as examples for discussion, then that’s fine.
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I’ve got a lot of terrible photos, many that are old slides, that I’ll never post on iNat even if they are the only examples I have of particular organisms. I’m my own worst critic of my photos. I realize many folks are using what equipment they have to take pics and we can’t all afford high-end cameras … that’s unfortunate but just the reality. But I feel more iNatters need to consider what they are posting and whether it’s worth someone else’s time to try to decipher what that blurry dot is. I feel no guilt about skipping over a really bad pic because it’s my time I’d be spending trying to interpret someone’s quickly-taken and perhaps poorly-considered photo. Not every photo is worth someone else’s time.
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I think most of the suggestions here are spot-on. There are tools like the Data Quality Assessment you can use, you can ignore the observation (and mark as reviewed), or, if you have a moment, you can make a comment and provide some helpful advice for what kind of photo/features would be useful in the future. That last option is good becuase it might prevent them from posting more tough-to-identify photos. We’re all here to teach and learn (or at least I’d hope we are), and that kind of comment has the chance of improving their contributions in the future.
For what it’s worth, only iNat staff or the account that posted the content can delete the content. Staff don’t delete content unless it’s obscene, racist, machine generated, made by a sockpuppet, or crosses lines similar to those. The Data Quality Assessment can make something “casual” grade and effectively remove it from view of most people who aren’t actively looking for casual grade observations.
This is really important. The purpose of iNat is not to keep out people who don’t meet some threshold of ability or expertise - it’s to help them on their journey of exploring and learning about nature (specifically biology). Here’s a good example of an expert who reached out to a non-expert to make an important discovery and change the course of the non-expert’s life. Now we may not all have the time, skills, or capacity to do that, but no one should feel talked down to or disrespected. I appreciate the time and energy others have used giving me pointers on how to best document things in the future.
For sure. I think we all just use our best judgement here, it’s all we can ask of each other, and that’s why every person gets a vote. I personally tend to be conservative unless it’s a taxon/region I’m very knowledgeable about (which for me doesn’t happen often!).
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Possibly one of the best thing you could do is:
- do not encourage the attitude of posting bad or poorly informative photos
- explain how to improve
- in the case, explain why a specific identification cannot be provided or why an upper grade ID has been provided
Just to summarize, if possible, avoid do-goodism when it’s the case but, at the same time, be enough patient.
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Me too, except I will still post them if I see enough in them to make them identifiable. Problem is, that assessment may only be possible with some level of pre-existing expertise in the group, so it may not be feasible that
When in doubt, I’d rather see people erring on the side of posting it. It takes hardly any time at all to mark something as reviewed and move on, and I agree,
If it’s getting IDs that seem unjustified, then I’ll spend a little more time (in the spirit of learning opportunities) either adding a disagreeing ID with comment, and/or voting that the community ID can still be improved. Then move on.
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That is also my approach to masses of leafy boughs with no distiguishing features. Especially if I can see that it’s a potted plant or a garden plant. Or a tangle of lawn and weeds with no one plant standing out from the rest, and it’s “Unknown.” If the observer won’t put in an effort, why should I?
Now that I know that can be done, I can think of at least one which I’d like to. One who seems to specialize in entire pages of what I described in the previous paragraph.
That is true of my oldest observation. But even so, there are old pictures which I decided not to scan or upload because I judged that whatever organism was incidentally in them did not have enough distinguishing features visible. A picture of me as a preschooler playing on the lawn? It would stay forever at “Grasses,” and I just don’t see the point.
If they were the ones paying for the storage bandwidth, they would probably think about that, too. @jdmore makes a good point about marking things as casual, but that doesn’t change the storage space they occupy.
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That’s become my philosophy … I’m not getting any younger so the idea of coaching an individual I don’t know (and who might not be that interested) on how to take IDable pics is not appealing to me. Although I’m happy to do that in the real world, if a person I know shows genuine interest and is a novice naturalist really trying to learn.
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I have many blurry or distant observations taken from moving cars or from a distance, but that was long ago on bioblitzes when I was concerned about winning. Nowadays if I am “cameraless” I will take a far photo of a lifer, which I explain in the comment section.
Speaking of “distant” observations, the Bushtit has had over 3000 false identifications with messing up “bush” for that bird. Although that distant observation may appear to be unidentifiable, it may just be a misidentification of a smaller species when the bigger species is the focus.
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