Management of pictures of specimen "artistically" altered

This conversation is sounding very similar to a recent one:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/is-a-photo-of-entrails-too-offensive-for-inaturalist/5465

A bunch of thoughts and summaries from that post and this:

What some find objectionable is perfectly acceptable, and even wanted, by others.

iNat has guidelines on what is acceptable, and organisms altered or dissected doesn’t breach those.

Are we talking about preventing the observations from existing at all, or just wanting a way to filter them out from your personal experience of iNat?

The easiest form of filter for content that you do not want to see is the “Next” button, or the equivalent of it… just move onto the next observation.

If you are worried about such observations cluttering your data pool etc, you can create a field, maybe called something like “Artistically altered organisms”, make it a boolean (yes/no), and then set that field on any observations you deem to meet that criteria. Then when using your data, you can filter them out.

If the “Potentially distressing content” flag ever gets implemented, and particularly in the form that we discussed in that thread linked above, you could use that flag in the same way, and put a message with the flag indicating “Artistically altered images”, and the users that have set the “warn for potentially distressing images” would see the message and decide for themselves if they want to click the message and show the image.

4 Likes