How to change Flickr photos in the "About" tab of an iNat "Place"?

[erinsnyder2]

Hello all! I recently created a “Place” for the nature preserve where I work and conduct ecological research (link to the Place page in question). My organization, Teatown, has a Wikipedia page which has synched with the “About” tab. See screenshot below.

However, the Flickr photos that are being pulled to the “About” tab are inaccurate. The first photo of Trientalis borealis was taken at our site, but all other Flickr photos displayed are incorrect. Some of them even feature IBM’s office in nearby Yorktown/Millwood.

When I do a quick search on Flickr, there are many photos by multiple users that actually show our site. I’ll link a few examples here. (example 1) (example 2). These Flickr albums or posts all mention Teatown or Teatown Lake Reservation in the photo descriptions and tags. Why isn’t the iNat “About” tab pulling these Flickr photos?

Is there a way to change which photos the Flickr widget is selecting? This question was posed by @colincroft in 2019, but his post is unanswered.

Thanks in advance for the help, iNat community!

[cthawley]

Courtesy of @jwidness

https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/assets/javascripts/places/show.js

short version:
inat chooses photos with high “interestingness” (exact algorithm is apparently a flickr secret but depends on comments, views, tags, etc.)
must be at the location
must be openly licensed

to clarify “at the location” – inat first checks for a matching woeid (this generally isn’t very useful, lots of places don’t have them), then checks to see if the inat place has a bounding box and if so, the flickr photo’s lat/lon must be in the bounding box, and finally, if the place has a lat/lon but no bounding box, the flickr photo’s lat/lon must match the place’s lat/lon

[jwidness]

Specifically for Teatown, the bounding box is approximately this area:

So you’re getting photos that flickr thinks are interesting and are within the bounding box, even though they’re not within the actual place boundaries.

And there is no mechanism on iNat to remove photos or add photos.