I agree, it’s going off topic. This topic is a feature request, not a question - and the motivation for the request is that sometimes the same photo is uploaded multiple times for the same organism. The feature is not intended to prevent people from using the same image for multiple organisms, just to ask them if they need to upload the photo again.
While I agree it’s better to upload one photo to use for observations of multiple organism within the photo, having the same photo uploaded twice for two different organisms isn’t a serious problem. What this comes down to, I think, is will the benefits of some sort of messaging asking users if they want to upload a photo again be worth the confusion it may cause?
The confusion is still active. We need a better way from iNat to manage duplicates. For the sake of taxon specialists who housekeep their chosen slice of iNat. If they are using iNat data for research, quality control is worth their time and effort. But the ‘frass’ is not.
Meanwhile I have a workaround using an Observation Field for Duplicates. Which can be searched for and retrieved.
Recently, I found groups (of 2 or 3 observations each) of observations from different observers with the same photo. This also should be avoided. Moreover, it breaks several rules: copyright + an observation should reflect a person encountering an organism.
I often see these generated as part of class projects, e.g. students sharing their photos from group outings with each other. Mostly they generate similar observations of the same individual by each taking their own pictures but sometimes even the pictures are the same. I assume maybe only one student in the group got a picture but they all did the observation together as a group and post several instances under different user names to all get credit for the class activity. This type of duplicate is probably something best addressed via communicating the issue to the teacher instructing them, if it is possible to find out who that is.
Sometimes these types of observations are generated outside of a class context, e.g. family members or hiking buddies sharing observations with each other. There is a feature request related to that.
It would be useful if users could share an observation - so if a group comes across a rattlesnake on a hike, everybody doesn’t need their own image of that one snake.
Also, if there are multiple photos from multiple users, they could be pooled as supporting that one observation. Copyright remains with the person who uploaded the photo(s) (as in eBird)
The use of duplicate photos is rife among kids involved in the CNC in certain places. I’ve seen one person create up to 10 observations with the same photo. It gets very tedious for the identifier.
I’ve just found an example of obvious sharing of photos - where at least 2 (and I expect more) people have done CNC observations of the same things using exactly the same photos, not just standing beside each other taking photos.
I know that iNat doesn’t run the CNC, but it would be really nice if iNat had something in place to stop the blatant rorting that happens during it. (Sorry, “rorting” is an Australian word for fraudulent behaviour.)
But I wonder if that is a glitch somehow while uploading.
One observer get stuck on … fruit bats one day. Another on plants. Another on birds. All their obs wrongly IDed on that day.
It seems to me that other fields, such as Species ID, could/should be included in creating a flag.
While apparent duplication of image is a major factor, there are occasions when an image contains more than a single species and has to be resubmitted for each species.
I don’t think the idea is to prevent people from being able to use the same image for multiple observations, but rather just to notify them and ask them to confirm that they want to create a new observation anyway.
I generally have a backlog of photos and occasionally have not managed to properly keep those that I have uploaded sorted from those that I have not, and as a consequence accidentally uploaded them a second time weeks or months later. My understanding of the feature request is that it is meant to help users prevent this sort of error.
If the observation is of a taxon I have limited knowledge about, there is no guarantee that the ID I enter would be the same as that on the existing observation, so using the ID to distinguish between “accidental repeat upload” and “intentional repeat upload” would not necessarily catch instances of the first situation.
(By the way, it is possible to duplicate an observation to record an additional species in a photo without uploading the photo a second time; while this won’t work in all cases – I often crop the photo differently if the focus is on a different organism – it can save a bit of storage space and allows one to see all observations it is used in if you click on the photo information.)
