I totally understand your concern for having the correct metadata for specimens! From prior discussions of ways people have proposed to avoid seeing death at iNat, I would still argue in favor of the =Dead annotation on a collection item’s photo set, as long as that dead state is what the photos in the record actually show.
To importantly preserve the concept of having collected the specimen while alive, maybe an Observation Field could carry that datum? Something appropriate might even already exist in the large list of fields. Might any entomologists be able to give advice on how best to do a separate but suitable annotation via observation field?
I realize that my opinion here is in direct contradiction to tiwane’s earlier advice in a prior thread, but then again higher up in the present thread, he describes a shift in thinking ( @tiwane if any additional ontopic remarks).