I use Snapseed on android and ipad for image editing, very simple and easy to use.
pctechtest site has many good photo editor recommendations.
I’m begging that this will be added to the new “iNat Next”. I’ve never used the in-app camera precisely because of the lack of cropping functionality. Instead i’m forced to use the default camera app which means my entire camera roll is 90% insect photos.
It really bugs me (pun not intended) when i’m just trying to show someone my go carting video and accidentally expose my thousands of insect photos, which, well, turns people off.
This has become my number 1 issue now that I’ve moved to iNat Next on Android.It does no allow cropping like the previous app did, therefore I am uploading very large photos on iNat, which:
- takes up space for nothing, and
- makes it more difficult for identifiers to focus on the organism
Also, I am not able to do the more cumbersome workaround of taking a photo outside of the app to crop it and then include it into a new observation, because iNat Next currently fails at adding photos from the Library (reported by others too).
Today, I assumed that the website would allow me to edit observations and crop the pictures after submission, but alas.
I would love to see this feature on the website. It would be very helpful.
Agreed. I do sometimes crop photos on my computer before uploading, but not very often, because (a) it’s an extra step, and (b) it has a tendency to lose the location data for some reason, which is a real pain. If I could crop as part of uploading, it would be far more likely to happen.
Why not edit on the phone or PC, before uploading your daily pictures in batch… plenty of free apps/software for that.
I can’t see doing this on the field personally, I prefer to do the editing as a separate task, and at home.
I couldn’t find any statement on this in the forums, but will this functionality (cropping and some basic photo editing tools) be added to the new iOS iNaturalist app? I just switched to an iPhone from Android, and while I love the design of the new app, this is a feature I am very much missing. I guess I could do the cropping and editing in a separate app as well, just would have to get used to it (and hope that the geo-tagging with the iPhone camera works better than it did on my old phone).
Hi all. While considering a cropping functionality, you might want to consider adding an auto-crop (content-aware) functionality as well, possibly with a human review/adjustments step. If anyone has set-up such a workflow, please let me know in the thread http://forum.inaturalist.org/t/auto-crop-images-of-animals-image-computation/70533/, which for someone reason was moved to ‘Nature Talk’.
Tagging @iPhil.
Just chiming in to say a basic cropping tool on the iNat website would be super helpful.
Thanks for listening!
hi @tiwane
For adding this to the website, would you accept a community pull request to add this feature.
I am not sure how the team handles these sorts of PR’s (I don’t want to annoy the team haha!)
I built this, on a fork of the iNat Next react native app: https://github.com/nebotron/iNaturalistReactNative
It uses some AI-powered subject detection for a first guess, and then you can adjust it. It’s right about 70% of the time in my experience (mostly for birds) which is enough to make it significantly faster than doing it manually. This is for the phone app only, not for the website.
It’s a bit of a pain to install it on your phone from source, at least for iPhone. You need to update the relevant files in the repo with your own Apple developer ID (see ios/iNaturalistReactNative.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj).
The interface looks like this. It’s a bit derpy. The AI chooses the initial crop, and then you can pinch and drag to adjust, and hit the green check to adjust once you’re happy.
Wow, absolultely amazing! Well done!
@benfh I have re-opened forum post https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/auto-crop-images-of-animals-image-computation/70533/ . Perhaps you could share the instructions there?
Hi everyone,
I’ve also got a bit of a problem with the photos and editing them. I document my observations using an Olympus camera (as some of the creatures I photograph are quite small) and then upload the files in batches via the website. Now, here’s the catch: for photos that could do with some post-processing, I then have to crop them, adjust the contrast and so on separately via the app. I’m a bit torn about this – the app takes ages to synchronise and then freezes after a few crops – I haven’t come across this feature on the website yet – and I’ve always found using extra software a bit of a faff. Have there been any discussions about this, or would this be helpful for website uploads for other iNat enthusiasts too? Perhaps one of you has an idea?
Thanks & best regards from Vienna :)
Most computers come with some kind of basic photo editing program pre-installed. Why does cropping the photos on your computer first and then uploading seem to you to be more complicated than uploading and then cropping in the app?
1. The image editing program (whichever one you use) must be opened separately.
2. Given the amount of data, it uses more RAM.
3. I won’t know whether a photo can be identified better by the algorithm—whether it’s edited or not—until after I’ve uploaded it. An editing feature online or in the app would be a very helpful iNat feature for me as a non-expert.
But you are opening a new interface when you go from the website (computer) to your phone – there is a separate step involved anyway. Most computers have basic cropping tools as part of the image viewer, so unless you are only using thumbnails to select photos, it should be straightforward to crop them while reviewing which ones you want to use.
What am I missing here?
The CV also works in the web uploader, does it not? If it struggles to suggest an ID from the photos, it is fairly simple to remove them and add a different version before uploading.
But in general: if the organism makes up only a small portion of the photo, it is better to crop, period. It is useful for everyone if we don’t have to search for the organism of interest in observation photos. The CV is meant as a tool to help users figure out what something is and should supplement, not replace, your own assessment of what you saw. If it is a taxon that the CV struggles with, cropping the image more closely is unlikely to provide a substantially more reliable suggestion than a photo that is cropped less closely.