Default images for taxons

Hi, this is my first post on the forum.
I’ve recently been annoyed how much the default images for taxons are changing.

Why can anyone change them? A lot of them are changed to poorly descriptive photos, or overly close up shots of the head without the body in frame, and distracting/unnatural backgrounds.
Just because it’s good quality doesn’t mean it’s a good default photo!! Or a good photo at all.

Thanks!

Luke

Because community will add them anyway, they’re bloked for some taa, but there will never be enough curators to add photos where they’re needed. Nobody can answer you but the person who change them why they do that, everyone doing it should follow guidelines https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-makes-a-good-animal-taxon-photo/6739 but sadly it’s not the case with every user.

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Given some of the questions that have been posted about this subject I suspect some people are putting up their images because they think it’ll give them some additional recognition or status, not because they have any good or representative photos of said taxon.

Admittedly, I have some of my photos up as the default taxon photo, but that’s only because they’re the only (or were at the time) research grade photos of said taxon. In other cases I’ve put other people’s photos as the default taxon photo if they have better ones.

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I’ve run across some of my own pics that are the default images for at least several taxa. Interestingly, I didn’t put them there … they were added by iNat staff or curators from my Flickr site years before I submitted them to iNat as actual records. Some might still not be iNat records.

But if someone wants to swap mine out for better images, that’s fine with me. But I agree that iNatters shouldn’t be making a photo the default just because it’s their photo and especially not if it’s inferior to the previous image.

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