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:
- RG Observations
- Observations (not necessarily RG)
- Flickr
- EOL (Encyclopedia of Life)
- 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.