just for refence, this was sort of discussed in previous bug report: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/observation-photographs-are-not-deduplicated-when-uploaded-by-the-android-app/32440.
it’s not super clear to me whether this is a bug or a design choice. i think would have been easier to code for the existing Android app workflow, but whether the current implementation matches the design intent or not is not clear to me.