Hi,
Cropping is a hard matter, which was already discussed here
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/increase-max-image-size-from-2048-x-2048-pixels/13627
I am not convinced that showing a crop overlay will solve the problem.
I think that there are two points to address:
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I am afraid that a large number of (most?) Inat users are not aware that photos larger than 2048x2048 will be automatically resized, and what this means. So the first think to do in my view is to pop-up a warning message each time a Inat user submits a larger photo, mentioning the risk of a loss of quality
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about cropping itself, I guess that most uploaded photos are in jpeg, and cropping a jpeg photo without caution can decrease its quality (may be as much as resizing) because of the 8x8 pixel (or 8x16 or 16x16 in case of chroma sub-sampling) block structure of jpeg photos. Fortunately there are some viewers (on computer) and apps (on cell phones) able to crop jpeg photos losslessly (see the other forum thread I mentioned above). This means that, ideally, somewhere (maybe in the warning message that should appear when a large photo is updated) some advice should be given to Inat users to crop their photos properly