Same topic also discussed here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/106449-better-image-matches-photo-similarity-update-to-computer-vision-suggestions
If a moderator can reopen this post
then I can add a link there back to this fresh update - which solves the issue.
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I think for the plants, taxon photos should represent flowers, flower buds, leaves, top[planar] view, and detailed leaf shots
It was a photo from Flickr, not iNaturalist. Yes, they were using a photo not from an observation, and I was surprised. It was a few years ago, so hopefully thatâs not done anymore.
There are still loads of mollusk photos from Femorale.
Photos are chosen in the same way whether they come from Flickr or iNat - meaning that you can still fix them in the same way. Of course, if youâre talking about flagging on Flickr thatâs something I know nothing about - Iâve never even looked at Flickr and know nothing about it (shocking, I know). And you can still choose Flickr (and a few other options) as a source of taxon photos, though itâs not the default.
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My reply was in response to your statement, âThe answer is not to flag anything, but to open the observation the photo comes from and correct its ID,â which was impossible since there was no associated observation, only someoneâs Flickr account. Therefore on iNaturalist, I flagged the photo and a curator helped. I was not suggesting going onto Flickr, which I know nothing about.
Okay, so if the photo has an associated ID on Flickr (which I likewise know nothing about) you canât change that. But you can still change/correct the taxon photo without needing to flag it or get help from a curator, which was my main point.
I tried. We are back to the unhelpful picture.
Will push yours to second âŚ
Since the chosen picture was âdestroyedâ I have flagged for curation.
Destroyed seems an overreaction for - I donât like that one, despite JPâs taxon knowledge.
For the pictures from Flickr - check whether the user is now on iNat. With an obs - which would provide a better link (hopefully RG too)
Yes, Iâm aware, but I wanted to point out the exception. EDIT: I see what you are saying though - not for me, but for the general public, we should be aware it is better to correct an iNaturalist observation than flag it. Point taken, and thank you for pointing this out to the world. :)
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There was no way to see who it was, if I recall correctly. It was a tricky species, so I was a bit surprised that a non-observation pic was used. At least their name wasnât associated with anyone on iNaturalist. Whomever chose the taxon pic chose that Flickr one, leaving no choice but for me to flag it, then a curator changed it. I also made the ID for every other photo of that species, until I reached that one, and then I was like, whaaa?
Yes, if they use the same name. In this case I was going through and IDing every photo of a particular species.
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I donât want to labour this, but you seem to be misunderstanding my point: this isnât an exception. You can still choose a different taxon photo, even if the original taxon photo was from Flickr - it doesnât require flagging or help from a curator.
The point about changing the observation ID was merely about cleaning up data problems while youâre looking at them, rather than trying to find them again later. Itâs very frustrating to remove an incorrect photo and then realise you need to correct the ID when you no longer have the linkâŚ
[Yes, I recently realised that you can look at the taxon photo history and probably find out that way - but I didnât know that before.]
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Stange: the same person promoted photo 3030253 as the cover photo on Mar 25, 2024 and destroyed it on Feb 26, 2025. (Misclick?). We will seeâŚ
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@leafybye: I just want to check that you know that you and almost every iNat user (not just curators) can change taxon photos. Just go to the relevant taxon page, click the Curation button (below the seasonality/phenology graph) and choose Edit Photos. If you see a taxon that it illustrated with incorrect photos, or if you see that the selection of photos could be improved, please fix them. Itâs very helpful to update the photos.
If you see Flickr, EOL or Wikimedia Commons photos used for an organism, many times thatâs an indication that the photos havenât been updated much since the early days of iNat, when those other sources had images available for a lot of species that hadnât yet been observed on iNat. If those photos are wrong or not helpful, feel free to remove them and replace them with better ones.
[Edited to add] Lots of people assume that only curators can change taxon photos, and I completely understand why, given that iNat users need to click a button with the label âCurationâ to get started.
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those who like the existing set will change them back and weâll enter a period of back-and-forth struggle over which photos to include.
This is already a problem and I think we need to troubleshoot ideas for this. For example any user without 1k ids and 100 observations (or perhaps half of that) cannot change the taxon photo. Or, one user can only change the taxon photo every 48 hours and once you have changed the taxon photo more than 5 times it must be reviewed by curator/staff before changing. Ultimately though it is unfortunate that this is a problem because the extra vetting is an unfortunate thing to happen. Maybe only curators could change it and an option will be available to message a curator to ask to change it, etc.
These ideas have flaws, but they are the beginning.
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In fact, it was finding misIDs in this way that started me checking through RG observations of species Iâm familiar with as quality control.
This is VERY important. More people should be doing this.
I like the idea of showing the most crucial part of the plant first, even if it is an âuglyâ seed or fruit.
Eh, as mentioned by cthawley you can make the id features the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th images. I think to help inexperienced people trying to chose what they are looking at the best and most general photo should be chosen. For example, for spiders if it was the genitalia photos needed for identification on the genus taxon photo that would cause a lot of confusion. With proper discernment this wouldnât be a problem bringing it back to the point in my other comment of not allowing just any user to change the photo.
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I absolutely understand your concern, but I would caution that we should avoid any changes that would create more harm than we currently see.
Right now, I think there are three limitations in place and they seem to be broadly appropriate:
- Users who created their accounts very recently or who have contributed very few verifiable observations cannot edit taxon photos.
- Taxon photos for certain prominent species (e.g. Homo sapiens) are locked.
- Editing taxon photos for higher level taxa is restricted.
I see two main problems happen with how people add taxon photos:
- New users, often younger, like to make their own photos into taxon photos (âMy cute dog is famous!â) A lot of this is already controlled by the limitations mentioned above. A few tweaks to those restrictions might make sense.
- More experienced users sometimes take a unilateral approach to âfixingâ taxon photos and come into conflict with other experienced users. This may result in add/revert conflicts, which perhaps could be reduced if we encouraged/simplified communication. This seems to be what happened with the Senna occidentalis taxon photo that @DianaStuder and @jeanphilippeb mentioned.
I understand the rationale behind the ideas youâre suggesting, but I think mostly they wonât work better than what we have.
In the scenario discussed, both users had way more IDs and observations.
This seems a little similar to Wikipediaâs Three-Revert Rule. I think there are a couple of differences from Wikipedia that would make it difficult to implement here. First, I think we can exclude most things that would require a lot of extra code, because weâd really prefer iNatâs programmers to be working on improving the site rather than building functionality to address minor behavior issues. So this would just be a policy change: âDo not revert addition/deletion of a taxon photo more than X times in Y hours. If you see this happen, create a taxon flag and ask the other user(s) to discuss the change.â That could work OK, even though taxon flags are a rather clumsy mechanism for discussions. But if the users involved cannot reach agreement, we need to recognize that iNat has much less infrastructure (and capacity) to moderate disagreements than Wikipedia.
Again, I understand the sentiment, but this really wonât work. There are maybe 2 million described taxa and iNat has observations for about 500,000 of these. There are 100,000 species in the CV model, for which iNat users have selected about 200,000 taxon photos. As a curator, I try to add and adjust the photos for the taxa I know as much as I can, but Iâm glad that non-curators can also do this work. There are lots of interested people who do not need curator rights to do things like make taxonomy changes, but can contribute a great deal by selecting good photos for the species they know. I think this strikes the right balance.
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Of course. I know all my ideas wouldnât be the perfect ones, I just put them out there so that others develop ideas. I do think something needs to happen when a taxonâs photo is very frequently switched [back-and-forth] even just something as simple as a notification to the staff or curators to fix the situation. Or even the ability to add the reason you chose a photo when you upload it so the other can see and add their a opinion and come to an educated decision. Again, non of these are a final idea Iâm just using them to say constant switching is a problem what can we do about it?
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