I hear you but these images are sometimes handy when one is looking at native pollinators and figuring out what non-native plants they have been nectaring or pollinating. Some carry them over as inbetween sources. When our study group looks at the bees, we try to identify the associated plant.
Why are media-less records different from too-blurry-to-ID photo records? They are different in that the absence of a photo or an audio file kicks the record straight to Casual and no review by anyone is needed. I’ve submitted a few such no-media records myself with species IDs which simply provided information for my use and no one else’s. I added a note to such records that no media were attached, just to make that clear.
Scroll down to DQA (data quality assessment) then click ‘no evidence of organism’
for example (PS no evidence is for identifiers, you KNOW it was there!)
Or right at the bottom - good as it can be, after you have added your own ID.
Any (relevant) DQA option will tip it from Needs ID to Casual (as in lacking data)
Not everyone has a 150-600 mm lens to photograph the Goldcrest they saw 30 metres away. A few months ago before I bought my camera I was stuck with 4-pixel bird photos on my phone. This a place where people document what they find, not a photography competition
And then there are observations like these…still processing after 7 years.
Try a message - he was active on iNat yesterday.
If that doesn’t work - a friendly comment and link on one of his ‘today’s obs’
Poke, poke, until you get a response.
I just want to clarify that iNat doesn’t pay for storage or transmission of any photo with a Creative Commons license (the default for new accounts). See this blog post. Odds are that a blurry photo is not really costing iNaturalist anything aside from its existence aside from the record making our database a tiny bit larger.
Because there is at least media evidence for the community to evaluate, and there are tools provided for any member of the community to grade the quality of the evidence presented.
Being rather a newcomer to this forum, I may have missed the suggestions how to improve e.g photos.
For anyone who presents blurry or murky observations and doing it frequently there should be a nice folder of hints how to improve camera settings, light sources, coloration software to enhance etc.
If I see people up-loading a flock of interesting moth, but seem to lack knowledge how to provide proper images, I give them some hints what they probably could do. Thus a link to such an information folder with examples would be a good thing to have.
There’re several topics on “how to” photograph anything, big for plants, insects, birds, etc.
A criticism I have of the phone app, which I do use for close-up subjects, is that it allows the user to snap a picture and upload it without taking time to assess if it was a good photo or not. I suspect most smartphones have some photo editing capabilities, such as cropping and maybe even sharpening or contrast adjustment. I typically do some reviewing and cropping of my phone pics before I upload them, sometimes a day or two later. If they’re really bad (which certainly happens for me), I just don’t upload.
If the user takes a few minutes to review and edit their pics before uploading it could reduce some of the really bad photos that are submitted. A little extra effort by the observer saves effort by others.
Yes, even the iOS app allows users to upload edited photos from the Camera app. I imagine the Android utility is even better that way.
Kinda like those people who do their “best” (read: only) proofreading after hitting “send.”
There’s a lot of assumption here, as well as needless criticism of other people. Let’s stay focused on constructive posts and not complaints.
Personally, i find this whole thread to be a mess of judgy preaching, barely-veiled ableism/classism, and violation of the TOS, so i am not sure why the thread even still exists, but that being said…
I know you say “just kidding” but you need to realize disabled people who can’t do this use the site and probably feel a stab of rejection every time you say things like this. Please stop.
it does when it’s random messages from strangers that keep happening and your idea of ‘better’ is not the same as someone else’s. The initially linked observation (now removed) that spurred this whole thing wasn’t blurry at all and quickly got an ID with more eyes on it.
you should think about how not everyone is lucky enough to have access to national parks and such, nor has either the education or the cultural context to distinguish the two (if indeed they even should be). I grew up in a pretty awful suburb and had very little access to anything other than ornamental garden plants. Thankfully this was before iNaturalist existed so i didn’t have anyone harassing me about it. But i don’t know why people are so set on judging others. Just mark it as cultivated and move on. If you find IDing on iNat such a burden, stop doing it. If it comes with harassing other users and you can’t control yourself, stop doing it.
Maybe. But if i had to do this before submitting every photo - going out of the app, editing the photo, re adding it to the app, possibly messing up the location data - I’d probably contribute about 90% less observations than i do now. Which… to be fair… would save effort by others because there’d be almost nothing to verify from me. But i don’t think it would actually be a good thing. There’d be about 40,000 less identifiable plant observations on the site than there are now, and that a good thing, is it? It would save more effort if the aggrieved identifier just stopped identifying at all. Some people have time to edit and process photos and enjoy doing so, so they do a lot of that. Others, like me, just don’t.
Blurry or distant photos can annoy me and they certainly seem worth bitching about (though only if they’re SO blurry or distant that I can’t ID them). However, I’m also frustrated by the very well photo’d willows that don’t show the underside of the leaf and the grass photos that don’t include the spikelet parts and edge-on butterfly photos and the observations that stay “opt-out” with an incorrect ID while correct identifications pile up and the many, many cultivated plant and the well photo’d tropical plants I don’t know how to identify and . . . .
So, mostly I pick through for what I can identify and enjoy them, enjoy some of the more interesting ones I can’t identify, and just let the rest go. Not that I’ll ignore an opportunity to complain about the problems, you understand, but most of this is the inevitable variation to be found in a large citizen science program. Sigh.
Your photos look good however you edit them, or not. The suggestion for editing is for those pics that really need some help.
yeah, i don’t mean to say suggestions are bad, they are fine when respectful and sometimes very helpful. Like, i didn’t realize before getting suggestions that it was generally OK to pick fruiting bodies of mushrooms and worth doing so to get good photos of the gills. And that i should photograph certain angles of shellfish not just from above. Stuff like that. I don’t mean it to be black and white like all comments on photo quality are bad. Just, i find the editing process on the iphone really tedious. I would, however, love to see basic editing like cropping and annotation right in the iNat app and website. Maybe not the highest priority but i think would help reduce this problem some.
I’m guilty of this myself but I’ve learned. Hopefully it sticks in my brain until next season.
Honestly, I’m pretty sure you had more than ornamental plants, that is what we all notice (I never associated them with nature though, just how good people planted this or this), but there’re more stuff growing or crawling around.
Let’s not tell others wether they should stop iding ot not, that is not any better than telling people to stop observing because they do bad. It’s normal for person to not be happy when others don’t follow easy rules, action that is not easy to change, that you can see looking at maps of any country where botanists are not active enough, e.g. the US, there’re not one or two unmarked things, but thousands of them, and nobody is doing the marking, including major iders! That is definitely a fault of local iNat culture, one that had to be set up when there were a few observations, not millions.
Why would you need to do that? Why being on the app at all? It’s a way to make less observations imo. Photo with normal phone camera app, then if you see something may be confusing for others, edit it, upload it all after. As I know you’re not disabled and can walk to a plant if you choose to do that, so your observations are held to a different standart. Every user should think if their photo will be a burden or they can do something to make the uploaded material better, of course if you can’t get closer or you’re in a hurry, that is a different situation if you’re just lazy enough to do more actions. Look at your photos, they’re definitely not what any of us would call “need editing”.
yeah to be fair i was pretty good at finding weird bugs and weeds so probably would have been doing that. I am not telling people not to ID though, i am telling them if the site rules make them super frustrated and miserable they might choose not to do IDs any more rather than just vent in here. But, some venting is OK. I concede some photos are ridiculously impossible to ID or are of completely irrelevant things like the house ones you mentioned.
I know everyone uses iNat differently but i need to make observations in the field, I have my spiky autism memory where i have very good memory for some things but awful short term memory for other things, if I take a bunch of pictures and edit and add later, i will be able to see what species are there but will forget which species i was targeting with the photo, the circumstances around the ID, etc. I also find the location doesn’t tag properly when you just take photos and use the geocoding later, versus the app. I am also not so good with organizational stuff. I have very little interest in taking photos and adding them later on the computer, for a ton of reasons i find that harder and less fun. So i always make observations within the app except in rare cases. I guess I am in the minority with that and so it doesn’t really pertain to the initial topic of the thread and i am roaming off topic. I will say for my first year or two on iNat, i basically had the attitude of ‘i know what it is, i dont care if it gets verified or not’ and would put in things like the side of an oak trunk with no leaves, and just didn’t care, not being a good community member. But i am user # 2179, from 2011, when i started i was literally one of like 2 or 3 people in Vermont using it, and had tried several similar websites that fizzled out. Over time i got way better about it and while i will take blurry or distant photos sometimes i only do so when i know they are still diagnostic as with white pine.
I guess my point is, i agree with what many are saying that ignoring the community aspect of the site and dumping stuff on the site thoughtlessly with no community engagement or consciousness is a bad thing, however, i don’t like the focus on ‘blurry or distant’ photos at all, as i don’t think the problem is blurriness, not getting out of cars, or anything of the sort, i think the problem is people not engaging with the community, learning, adapting, and having conversations about IDs.