i doubt that this is new. since a change last year to evaluate non-square images using a center square crop, there’s always been a greater potential for unexpected results, if your diagnostic features fall outside or on the edge of the center square.
i think there was also some leftover increase in the inconsistency between how the web uploader page evaluates images vs how they are evaluated in other parts of the website, and i don’t think that was ever resolved.
i think if you want to get the best computer vision results during upload, you need to make sure things fall within the center square of your image.
elsewhere in the website, you can get better recommendations after upload because it evaluates a little differently, and (as has always been true) it will also narrow down the universe of possible suggestions based on the iconic taxon of the observation. so if you didn’t get any good suggestions during upload, go ahead and specify a high-level ID like plants or birds, and then check the suggestions again after upload. most likely they will be better.
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on another note, i’m guessing that computer vision suggestions, especially for distant or blurry subjects will probably get worse and worse in the future, not because the model is getting worse, but because it has more species that it knows about, and more and more of those species will have similar features that make them hard to separate easily.