Honestly, I’d rather spend my time with things like figuring out whether my ID is correct than worrying about whether I have edited my photos to some specific standard before uploading.
My approach is pragmatic: if the photo needs cropping, I crop to whatever size seems reasonable for the particular photo – i.e. the organism of interest is more-or-less centered and takes up a decent portion of the image. Sometimes I might leave a bit more background for aesthetic reasons, if I like the scene or whatever. If I’m not cropping the photo, I will resize it before uploading.
I don’t own Photoshop and I do very minimal editing of my photos other than cropping and occasional lightening. I figure that if the photo is so poor that I have to use all sorts of image processing tools to make it identifiable, I am probably better off just discarding it.
I haven’t noticed any obvious reduction of quality/visibility of relevant details if the photo gets resized on iNat’s end because it is a bit larger than the maximum pixel size.
From the perspective of an IDer, I don’t care whether photos are square or not. I do appreciate it when the organism in question is visible from the thumbnail.
I don’t have a problem with people including environment photos as long as the organism is actually visibly recognizable somewhere in the photo – however, if this is the first photo, the result is that I approach such observations with trepidation, because I am expecting that IDing the observation will involve squinting at images to try to find the blurry insect hidden somewhere amidst the mass of green. If I know I can expect nicely cropped images in the observation, I approach it with a bit more enthusiasm.
If there are multiple organisms present in the photo, I appreciate it when users recrop the image instead of simply reusing it if they are posting a second observation for an individual that is not the obvious focus of the image (i.e., if there is a much larger and more prominent organism next to the organism of interest, or if the organism of interest is at the edge of a rectangular photo and doesn’t appear in the thumbnail at all). This reduces the likelihood that someone quickly IDing observations will mistakenly ID the wrong organism. What I see in the thumbnail primes me with certain expectations about the focus of the observation, even if there is a note indicating that it is something else.
I just do the best I can to make sure that the subject of the observation is as clear as possible and anything that is relevant to the subject may be considered.
I don’t know how people compose wild animal photos. I struggle to get the shots at all. Just get an image before it’s gone. whatever I have is what I have.
That’s easy. As the subject is a small dot in the picture anyway, you have all the time you need to compose the shot … in post by choosing what you crop out.
As others have said dpi and ppi settings are really only relevant when printing or scanning images since it is really a ratio to use for relating digital and analog sizes. When displaying on a screen whether computer monitor, tv, phone, tablet, etc. the size an image appears depends non only on the screen’s physical size, but also the display’s resolution.
Always save originals because you can always crop, resample, and compress photos to make them smaller… but never get back what you’ve lost if you save over the original.
I know many people don’t process their photos before uploading to iNat. But, if you’re going to take the time to do it anyways I’m a big proponent of cropping to a square fairly tightly to your subject. It just makes exploring the observations on the site whether on phone or desktop so much more pleasant. It’s much easier to identify if you don’t have to play “Where’s Waldo?” to try and find the tiny insect in the huge photo first. I also frequently browse through hundreds of my own past observation thumbnails to look for things I’ve seen before but can’t remember the name of. Often if the photo isn’t tightly cropped, the thumbnail image isn’t helpful. If it is tightly cropped, but NOT as a square then key parts may not be visible in the square thumbnail image iNat creates with your rectangular photo. Having a closeup of a damselfly abdomen with its head and tail not visible is not a helpful thumbnail image.
My current camera is only 12 megapixels and takes photos 4000x3000 pixels, so usually when I crop I just upload the cropped photo as is since it is pretty close to or often smaller than the size iNat uses (2048 pixels).
If however you take very high megapixel photos of a small subject with lots of “background”, don’t crop to your subject, upload that original large image which will then get downsized by iNat, and then rely on other people to have to zoom in to see the small subject… it may not be identifiable anymore.
I probably just repeated a lot of what others already said! But, I know from experience it can be confusing, and sometimes hearing it a slightly different way makes it click more.
On that note, I do appreciate one observer who crops pictures of road kill such that the initial view only shows a foot or a tail – enough to know that it is a road kill picture, without being subjected to the full goriness unless I so choose. Very considerate.
