With a cap on duration, resolution and framerate, the possibility of uploading video footage to iNat sounds exciting, especially for cataloguing animal behavior. I imagine video records would not be uploaded to GBIF however, which doesn’t matter much considering iNat’s primary aim isn’t scientific research.
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I guess @fffffffff found a way to do this by encoding a short video as a GIF, see her comment/example: here.
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Just for the heck of it, through the passenger side window of our car, I tried to quickly zoom and photograph a plant as we sped away from a traffic light.
It was blurry, but the CV still got the right answer among the top suggestions:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/144949251
Considering that >90% of iNat users never put in any identifications of other people’s observations, considering that only a small fraction of observations are blurry, and considering that some identifications can still be made, blurriness is not an important problem.
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Great example of something that I couldn’t personally ID but given the location is factored in and that color and general shape are both pretty clear features, I’d assume somebody would be able to. And then if nobody can, oh well. Still worth giving it a shot. Never know if you never try. Keep on doin’ ya thang.
Also, I really do like your last paragraph, too. Perspective, and more importantly acknowledging one’s different from your own, matter a lot on this topic, in my opinion.
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Yes, avoiding seeing the observations of another user is not what blocking is for. Blocking is a very strong action that interferes with some of the ways that iNat works. It’s available because it is needed in some cases where users’ safety or wellbeing is compromised, but admins have the right to look into the reasons for blocking. Please don’t use it just to avoid seeing another user’s observations because they are annoying.
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I agree with @jeffhansen1. What’s the use of a photo that can’t be ID’d?
It costs iNat money to store photos. If they’re not contributing in any way, except to take up space, they should be deleted by those whose job it is to do that. iNat isn’t a photo competition, but that’s not the point. The photos have to at least be visible enough to see what needs to be ID’d. Delete photos that are to “awful” to be ID’d. It might also be good to respectfully let the observer who took the unusable photo know that the photo is too blurry or distant to ID. Most people are able learn to take better photos.
There is no one employed to delete poor quality photos. Scroll on by.
Apparently server space is not a problem. According to previous threads.
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M, observer should decide what they would delete, not other people. There’re observations of houses, probably thousands of photos of those, thousands empty observations, thousands observations with no dates or place, or id. iNat is fine with any amount of blurred photos that are uploaded with no ill intent.
There’s no
Nobody can touch an observation, but the observers, there’s no job of deleting anything.
There’s things that matter much more than something you personally can’t id, people here hating on some blurred pics could do their part and id normal pics that are awaiting of attention, instead people wish to waste time here. If you’re iding a lot, you know it’s pointless, and yes, staff said before, it is not a problem to store that, phone pics don’t weight much.
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iNats aim is not necessarily to have every observation identified by independent people. iNats aim is to connect people with nature… as such, even blurry observation that cannot be identified by anyone else but the observer him-/herself have their justification
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I meant that there are people who work with iNat to help sort out flagged photos/observations. I don’t think any of us want to discourage others to connect with nature (although maybe they should get out of their cars to do so…Just kidding!!).
And it doesn’t hurt to encourage and teach folks how to take better pictures. They might enjoy nature even more if they had better photos to look at.
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Blurred photos shouldn’t be flagged, they’re marked as “can’t be improved”.
Of course, leaving positive comments on how to make better photos is a good thing to add.)
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That would still exclude the ones which cannot be identified by anyone including the observer. An unidentifiable “Unknown.”
Last week, some of my family and I were driving down a highway in Yukon, Canada, about -30C temperature, and saw a wolf trotting down the side of the road. We turned around and I took some blurry pictures of it. It may not be identifiable from the photos, but I’ll probably upload it as an observation because I could ID it as a wolf and I’d like a record of its time and location. If I’m lucky, maybe someone can confirm it’s a gray wolf.
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This is the thing, these observations are a record of peoples personal experience with nature. We have the good fortune to be witnesses in some cases to that experience - we help identify or corroborate what we can, when we can, as we can. There are many levels of skill sets to recording such observations that can vary depending on experience, equipment, and conditions - any variation here can push that observation image either way as far as quality is concerned. There are many skill sets also as identifiers are concerned - and we don’t know what we don’t know. I was helping with a bird count last weekend and the team leader was phenomenal in his knowledge - he could differentiate dialects in bird calls, he could tell the flight pattern much the same as he said recognizing the walk of a friend from a distance. It will take me years, maybe never, to develop my skill like this.
I too have a blurry photo of a gray wolf (pup) taken out of the car window on a gravel highway (the Dempster) in the Yukon - I’m going to post it too - it was 22 year until I saw my next wolf in the wild. As you say , you wish to record your observation and its location and time - to me this is what iNaturalist is for. From this information (data) can be gleaned but I don’t think we should see ourselves as gatekeepers of what quality should or should not be on the site. I believe I have seen it said before that researchers will vet from the RG observations what is suitable for them.
I’m quite hesitant to agree to making something casual just to remove it from Needs ID. What is the rush - just move on.
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For iNat I place a high value on @fffffffff helping to ID what the ‘rest of us’ can point at - Insecta, help please?
Blurred or distant photos are not an issue for my use of iNat.
I prefer to sort out anomalies on distribution maps, which in turn trigger this has been ‘seen nearby’. Not, actually!
Similar experience with Gray Wolf and it did get id’d: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/68418218
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I just want to point out that this is often an issue with audio observations too. I think the reason for this is that there are few or no iNat guidelines for best practices when uploading sounds. I get frustrated with lots of distant or seemingly nonexistent sounds, but I also think people simply don’t know what makes a sound observation effective. It’s not like a photo in that you don’t just want to capture a smapshot - longer is better for sounds. You also want to describe, as best you can, the sound you want to be viewed as focal and IDed. I might make a tutorial about this - crediting my inspirations and sources, of course - but I really think iNat ought to make it clearer. I think that would reduce the difficulty with sounds by a lot.
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the forum won’t let me heart this more than once! consider this quote/reply to be an additional 4 hearts!
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Occasionally folks (me included) post an observation without any photo or audio. I did this when I came face to face to a deer in a field where they had not been seen before. It was so unexpected it startled me and I was unable to get a photo before it bounded into the brush. It is now a “Casual” observation. However, I did want to note that I did see a deer at the location. Why are too blurry photos and too distant photos for an ID any different? Reading the iNat article https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#quality leads me to believe that there is a way for the users (the community) to adjust the quality from Needs ID to Casual, I just don’t know how to vote observations down from Needs ID to Casual.
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I’m not sure what to think when someone’s “personal experience with nature” is mostly ornamental garden plants. Especially when I see such a high percentage of such observations in a part of the world that I long to visit to see the wild nature.
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