Do the 'view more' photos on the taxon page default to RG?

General
1

Someone IDd one of my observations and I went to the taxon page to learn more. I was really surprised to see MY photos on the page, even though my observation isn’t Research Grade.

I was going to submit a bug report because I assumed it was a mistake, but then I found there have been many discussions about this in the past (like: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/taxon-photos-on-about-page-from-observation-needing-id/2777). I had never even noticed that there’s a filter for Quality Grade on the page, and mine was set to ‘Any’.

The consensus from previous discussions is that the default should be RG only. There’s a feature request from July 2019 with a note saying that’s now been done.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/view-more-photos-should-default-to-quality-grade-research/4874

It’s possible that I accidentally set mine to ‘Any’ at some point in the past, so I can’t tell what the actual default is. The worrying part is that I hadn’t noticed that it could be changed and I’d been assuming that the photos were all good examples I could use to learn to identify taxa.

There was a feature request from Aug 2019, asking that there be some visual reference to show which photos are not from RG observations, which I think is an awesome idea, but it never got much attention.

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/indicate-whether-research-grade-on-taxon-page-photo-browser/5835

  1. Does anyone know if the taxon photos actually do default to RG?
  2. Maybe we could get some traction on the request for some way of indicating when photos are not RG?

I’M aware of it now, and I’ll be careful, but there must be many people not realizing that the taxon photos may not all be correct.

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2

I’m pretty sure taxon photos don’t default to RG, because when I’ve been going through taxons for Wiki Loves iNat I’ve definitely come across non-RG observations if I don’t filter the list.

3

It was changed to default to RG. So pre that change there will be some not RG, and also some from Flickr (which may be good, or not so)

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We need to distinguish what we mean by “Do the taxon photos actually default to RG?”

(Almost) any iNat user can edit taxon photos. To do this, go to the taxon page, find the Curation button on the right side, choose Edit Photos, and a photo picker dialog will pop-up, with possible source photos on the left and the current taxon photo selections (up to 12) on the right.

In this photo picker dialog, a user who is looking to change the taxon photo selection can choose from five sources:

  1. RG Observations
  2. Observations (not necessarily RG)
  3. Flickr
  4. EOL (Encyclopedia of Life)
  5. Wikimedia Commons

The default display for taxon photo selection is indeed to show photos from RG Observations for the user to select the best taxon photos.

The user chooses taxon photos and drags them around in the pane on the right to change the order.

Once taxon photos have been chosen, there is no logic to preferentially display RG photos. In most cases, the photos displayed are just the first several from the list of up to 12:

  • First photo for the taxon thumbnail
  • First two photos in the Suggestions pane in the Identify and Compare dialogs. §
  • First five photos as thumbnails below the primary taxon photo on the taxon page.
  • All 12 photos below the primary taxon photo when investigating a taxon in the Suggestions pane.
  • All 12 photos as options to compare against in the Android app.
  • And so on…

§ Note that if you use “Visually Similar” as your search criterion in the Identify and Compare dialogs, iNat will now show the most visually similar taxon photo in the first location, and then use the taxon photo order to determine which image to use for photo #2. Also, it’s useful to know that the algorithm for this “Visually Similar” selection includes all subtaxa, so the most “Visually Similar” photo for a suggested genus could be a taxon photo for a species or subspecies in that genus.

This request seems like a variant of the one discussed here (Flag or otherwise mark taxon photos whose CID doesn’t match taxon), which proposes tracking taxon photos to determine if the observation they came from now has a different Community ID.

I would be fine to also have an indicator showing whether a taxon photo is associated with an RG observation (probably not displayed in thumbnail contexts). However, these requests may not be as easy as they seem, because as IDs on observations change, this functionality implies tracking those ID changes, recognizing when they’re associated with images used as taxon photos, and then updating some type of flag for each taxon image.

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5

I think the OP was asking whether the default is RG when you click the “View More” button on a Taxon Page

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not when you go in to edit the Taxon Photos.

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I think that’s what was being asked

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6

No, it does not default to RG.

There is a filter on the upper left that says “Quality Grade”. You can set that to “Any” or “Research”, but the default is “Any”.

Sometimes a filter that’s been previously used on the “View More” page will be retained when you look at other taxon, so you need to keep an eye on those filter settings.

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7

I opened Microsoft Edge, a browser I’ve never used, went to the photo browser for “American Robin”, and the photo browser defaulted to Research Grade, so I’m fairly sure this is in fact the default:

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It’s worth bearing in mind that even RG observations can be wrong - or sometimes the first photo is right but subsequent photos are wrong (a thing I’ve caught a number of times while scrolling through taxon photos) and the identifier either didn’t notice or left a comment but didn’t follow up to mark ‘not a single subject’. In general, Casual and Needs ID observations will have a (much?) higher error rate than RG, but no dataset is error-free - so don’t rely too much on a single observation, and if one looks distinctly different from the rest, consider being suspicious of it.

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I think there’s confusion as to what “taxon photos” is referring to here (at least I’m very confused, maybe it’s just me). Here’s a taxon page:

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The photo marked A and the photos marked B were hand-selected by a user to represent the taxon, and may or may not even be from inat observations. @rupertclayton summarized above how these are picked.

The photos that display when clicking where I’ve marked C seem to sometimes default to RG and sometimes not (they don’t for me, but they do for @yongestation).

The photos marked D are just the most recently observed examples of the taxon, and definitely do not have any “quality control”- if you just observed the taxon, there’s a good chance your photo will appear here.

OP was asking about the ones marked C, which is a good question, because in my case the answer is definitely “no”, but others seem to report that for them it’s “yes”. Weird.

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I think this remembers what you set it to last time, because when I set Life Stage = Larva, it remembers that across the “View more” photos for taxa where that is a relevant annotation. It also remembers that I have set my Quality filter to RG. If I change one of those and close/leave the photos page, it will remember those settings the next time I do “View more”.

So I think we all can set our personal defaults, but it’s been so long that I don’t remember what the “default defaults” are

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11

Yes, the settings are extremely sticky, and also apparently they used to default to “Any” before being switched to default to “Research Grade”. So if yours default to “Any’“ it’s either because you switched that setting at some point or because you started using iNat before they made that switch and it kept that setting possibly? Again, default here just means what theyre set to for a new account, as soon as you manually set them once they will retain those new settings when ever you open the photo browser for any taxon.

I do find the degree to which the settings are sticky very counterintuitive. There have been so many times where I’ve been browsing taxon photos very confused until realizing a sex/life stage filter I applied to some completely different taxon a week ago is still on.

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12

Just double-checked by making a new account and the photos in the taxon photo browser (eg https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/12890-Catharus-guttatus/browse_photos) default to the Research Grade filter.

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