That doesn’t seem like very constructive behavior on the part of the IDer. I mean, I understand the potential for confusion if there are multiple organisms in one photo and it isn’t clear which one is the focus of the observation. And I do think it is useful if users crop or mark at least one of the photos in an observation (preferably the first one) to prevent misunderstandings.
But if photos where more than one species is present can’t be ID’d to anything more specific than “life”, I estimate that this would apply to at least 90% of the observations on iNat – an exception being perhaps birds photographed in flight against the sky, or collected specimens on an empty background. Everything else is likely to contain plant matter, or lichens, or some other stray organism that has made its way into the image.
For most observations, there’s an obvious subject despite having other things that could be observations in the picture. Usually its made clear because people will put their initial ID in so even if the photo isn’t a great composition, it can usually be figured out. That’s really not the single photo obs-with-probs that people are having issues with.
The photos with issues are usually ones that are single photo of a vague landscape shot with no obvious subject that either doesn’t have an initial observation suggestion, or has it as something very vague like ‘plantae’. Stuff like this always feels like someone just uploaded their entire camera roll without any curating, and then it gets worse because these are the same people that also just won’t respond to you when you ask them what they were intending on focusing on.
So I just stick it at ‘Plantae’ or ‘Life’ and move on because what else can you do? There’s millions of other observations on this site that need IDed