After contributing my own photos to an empty species thumbnail just moments ago, I suddenly realized that I don’t know of a way to check how many of these I have done to date (and I’ve done quite a few). If there is not already a way to check this, would it perhaps be a feature worth considering for the iNat team?
I guess I should take this opportunity to also ask for a way to curate and manage this process because, as of right now, any Tom, Dick or Harry can upload images he thinks represents a particular species but infact is a photo of a different species entirely
There is not, so a feature request would be appropriate. I think this would be a helpful addition.
While this is possible, I don’t think it’s as common as people adding correct photos. I wish more people knew how to edit them, because there are so many flags for incorrect photos that curators can’t verify themselves.
I also wondered that. I have done hundreds of thumnail edit in the past, both adding photo in a empty thumbnail and correcting wrong ones. Also I am keen to change thumnail to a better photo since quite a lot of species thumnail photos are not of high quality or not showing all of the characteristics.
(If there is a wrong photo in the species thumnail, it can be deleted via taxon page. Curation→Edit photos)
However, I think thumnail edit should only be allowed to limited people (maybe curators) because some users may want their own photos to be thumnails and may replace selected high-quality photos to their photos just for their satisfication (unless their photos are actually better than the existing thumnails).
At the moment any user can edit thumnails, but I do not see this happening too frequently, probably because it is not very easy to find out how to edit thumnails.
Having some kind of log and requiring leaving a comment every time someone changes the taxon photos would be helpful. If anyone is a repeat offender of using incorrect photos or explicitly their own, that makes it traceable. Side note, nothing wrong with using your own photos - I often use mine because there aren’t better high-quality alternatives - but using your own wrongly IDed or low-quality photo is fishy. Restricting it to curators would be too limiting.
Some way to track taxon photo changes is a good feature request. Being able to lock a popular taxon that gets way too many photo changes (maybe curator changes only in this case) could also be useful.
Not entirely topical, but one thing I wish for is the ability to choose a specific photo for a thumbnail by searching by phenology or even by something like observation ID. There are some taxa with have hundreds, or thousands of observations, I’ll take a really good photo which I want to add to replace a mediocre photo, but no matter how many times I hit “next” I can never find it to add.
You can already do this! Just select Observations from the drop-down menu and then put the observation number/id in the search box (not the full url, just the id number).