Change “original” to “max”, on photo sizes link text

Example of proposed change:

Sizes

small
medium
large
max

Currently, this reads “original” for the link text, not max. There are two problems with this wording:

  1. It’s a little confusing to some users, since iNat resizes images.

  2. More importantly, in my opinion — It makes it unnecessary complicated/confusing in the very rare instance that an IDer is requesting a cropped photo (to clinch ID). In other words, no, I cannot see your original photo by clicking the “original” link. While this doesn’t happen very often, it would be a simple easy-to-make change that’s overall much more accurate.

Yes, that makes sense.

Actually a 3-option list is enough (small, medium and large), annotations of resolution by the side would be better.

3 Likes

i agree with this request, but i suspect that this won’t be done any time soon because it could involve a lot of changes, depending on how you approach it. the simplest change would be to only change the text labels on the photo pages in the website. but a more complete change would involve changing the names of the files themselves, which would result in many more downstream effects to deal with.

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iNat only resizes images with dimensions over 2048px. So if the image is within those dimensions - it will not be resized and thus it will be the original.

A minority of photos are originally 2048 or less, comparatively.

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Since metadata are stripped no photos on iNat are originals.

5 Likes

True, and this is an important distinction because a new user (or potential new user) might incorrectly assume that anyone could discover the location of their obscured observation via downloading the “original” and viewing the metadata.

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Well, it is sometimes the original size and that’s what “Sizes:… original” refers to. But I agree that “original (size)” is incorrect is most cases.

I vote for the “small - medium - large” suggestion - there’s no need for more options.

2 Likes

just to clarify here, the current max dimensions for large, medium, and small are:

are you sure that’s really what you want?

(just for reference, at 3:2 ratio, a 1024px wide photo would be roughly a 0.7MP photo. at 2048px, you’ve got 2.7MP.)