Cool clip! And a good example where a captured distinct motion can be very helpful to others in terms of identification.
Also, if you choose to make it standard practice to put the GIF after the stills, you can just reorder the pics for this one.
I watched your GIF, which was very interesting, but I really appreciated being able to swap to the still image when I’d had enough.It was also good from my perspective that the still image was first, so would be the one showing in Identify.
Here’s a specific reason I don’t care for animated GIFs: I am a life-long birder (read: many decades) so in the field my focus is keenly attuned to catching sight of motion in my surrounding environment. That mode of attention serves me very well in the field but it can’t just be turned off when I’m sitting at my computer. From that inherent training of my vision/attention, it is nearly impossible to try to focus on one still image (e.g. on an ID or Explore page) when there’s something else wiggling in another observation in the corner of my eye. Just impossible.
I did not know about this project, and I just added any GIFs I made to it. It would be nice to have a filter for “Has motion” like the “Has sound” filter. This assumes it is possible to filter for the inverse of these filters with boolean logic, which I am not sure exists yet. My motion activated cameras pick up night life that we otherwise usually miss, so I was using GIFs as a workaround since videos are not allowed. It takes considerable time and effort to crop and convert those video files to GIFs, at least for me using free software. I was hoping it provides some benefit through seeing how these animals actually move. I only upload ones of reasonable interest, like a bobcat or a skunk. A camera captured a kangaroo rat like rodent once that had a very distinctive hop and gait; a still image would not convey this.
If a still image comes first and the observer does not tag it with the project, how would one find GIFs without a filter or tag specific for them? You can easily filter to observations with sound but not with motion. Personally, I would like to be able to find observations with motion more easily, but I can see how from an identifier standpoint it would be very distracting.
@pisum do you know any way of sorting out obs with .gif files using the api?
There doesn’t seem to be a still photo, and the motion speed is too much, so I would have to pass on identifying that one. The blue is nice, though.
There’s such a small number that a gif in addition to photos probably won’t be an issue for most identifiers. The faster ones make me dizzy, so putting them after the photo(s) would be considerate of people’s sensory issues. They do capture aspects that are hard to photograph and bring species to life in a way photos can’t.
as far as i know, there’s no server side filtering for this sort of thing. you could filter on the client side, but it’s easier to just implement some sort of block of GIFs on the client side.
your time is better spent loading actual videos to a platform like YouTube and then linking to those videos in your observations.
That one isn’t bad since there’s no movement, especially compared to the other one posted (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/254664002) which is both headache-inducing and not a very useful observation. But I also don’t see how it being a gif is an improvement over two still photos. And while it is kind of interesting, it seems like an odd choice to post only that instead of having it third alongside the stills it was made from.
For some of us, unexpected GIFs can induce dizziness, nausea, headaches, even seizures. I can watch and enjoy a GIF if I know it’s coming, but otherwise, instant vertigo. So this is an accessibility issue. Just put the GIF as the second image – that’s all anyone seems to be asking.
You know, no one in the world is more than temporarily able-bodied. I look forward with interest to the day when you, suffering from some difficulty that other people could easily help out with or avoid exacerbating, get a reaction like the one you’re offering here. Which frankly verges on trolling.
We’re having a discussion where people do disagree and can learn. The comment supports an alternative to seeing GIF’s that isn’t entirely unreasonable, though it does come from an assumption very common for many of us; that the computer things we can do are easy for others to do. It may also come from a place of not taking the health objections to GIF’s as seriously as one might wish, but education is more effective than insult in most of these cases. (I don’t like GIF’s and that work-around seems like much too much of a nuisance, so I certainly don’t agree with it, but calling it “trolling” sounds too close to an insult to me.)
Moving some posts below, from a different topic, here.
If you do upload a gif please, please, please don’t make it the first image on the observation. Having one or more gifs on a page full of observations is so distracting and irritating. All those images with conflicting motion is awful.
I respectfully disagree. The original yard projects umbrella has several of these on the stats page. They tend to get the most faves which implies they are appealing to users. It also implies that they add data that can’t be captured by a static image. There must be valid technical reasons why support must be dropped but they do get plenty of engagement and up-votes.
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/backyard-biodiversity-global-umbrella-project?tab=stats
The request was not to refrain from uploading GIFs at all, but to refrain from using this as the first image (i.e., the one that is shown on thumbnails when browsing) as many people find this visually distracting or worse, so we would like to not be forced to see GIFs.
Afraid I’m not following you here. The argument I was responding to was that they are distracting and irritating.
That is what I’m respectfully disagreeing with. I find them engaging. There is often information captured in movement that isn’t immediately obvious in a still photo or a sketch.
If you read the post carefully, it was not an objection to GIFs per se, but specifically to having them as the first image – “distracting and irritating” referred to the effect of having one or more GIFs (with competing movements vying for one’s visual attention) on a page of observations.
Just because you like them doesn’t mean everyone does, and for some people they are more than just visually distracting, but cause cognitive distress. It isn’t about whether the content can potentially provide more information or be engaging by capturing behaviors, but about the visual effect of moving images. Unlike videos, which only start once one clicks on them, GIFs are automatically activated by default in one’s browser. Furthermore, on a website like iNat one is generally not expecting images to move without warning, so one is not mentally prepared and may not have adjusted computer settings accordingly. Nor should users be expected to have to do so in order to use iNat without distress.
So it is considerate to not put them as the first image where people can’t avoid seeing them (whereas if they are some image other than the first, it is possible to review the observation without seeing the GIF)