Multiple obs or single ob for a series?

[jeanelz]

I am in luck. On Sunday I spotted an inkcap that had just pushed the fruit body above ground, and, despite some serious weather challenges, I’ve managed to take 3 images of it once a day around the same time, sort of a timelapse series.
I’ve never had the opportunity to do a timelapse. I would appreciate some help as to how to upload this series as it might be of interest. (Incidentally, the old book “A Field Guide to the Mushrooms of South Africa” has drawings in a timeline that looks almost the same as my photos!)

Do I post one separate observation with all 3 images for each day or do I rather load the best image from each of the days (5 so far) as one complete observation?

Or, would researchers prefer a collage image for each day still uploaded as one observation (the image is a collage of today’s images)? Please note that the collage image above is made in MS Collage and the metadata will now be of the collage image and not of the individual images, hence today’s image will have metadata for a later time than when the obs actually took place.

If I were to upload the entire series (as of now 15 photos) as one observation, to I annotate the dates directly on the photos to ensure that each day is clearly seen (obviously the photo detail will have the date and time on it) by users? And also, what would be the date of the observation for the complete series - day one or the last day (I think it might go another two days)?

If I am supposed to post each day separately, is there a requirement or a method to cross reference in the fields so that it is still apparent that this is a series?

[bouteloua]

When you revisit the same organism on a different day, you make a separate observation (see FAQ).

There aren’t any requirements to link observations together, but some people use observation fields to do so (e.g. like this)

Some people like the aesthetics of collages, others prefer to have higher resolution images - no requirement there either.

[derbyshirewoodwose]

Original images too, I think, rather than collage/montage. See thread - https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/do-photo-collages-confuse-the-inaturalist-computer-vision-model/66475 - uploading the images individually maximises resolution for each image.

So an observation for each sighting (ie one per day), with multiple individual photos attached to it.

[ken_ohio]

You can use the Observation Fields and put a link to the previous observations there.

You can edit this in the Edit web page for the observation.

[jeanelz]

Thanks to everybody that helped and gave advice.
That specific inkcap is still in the decay process (although it does not look like much is happening at this point), but my luck (and the weather ) held for a complete 4 days for a Mica Cap. So what looked to be an easy process, turned out a bit weird. When I first uploaded all the obs, I did it as a batch upload with the days exactly in order. On submission though the order changed and I ended up with a sequence of day 1, day 3, day 2 and then day 4 (See Image) (Obs numbers were also out of sequence)

This offended my sensibilities a fair bit, so I decided to delete them all and rather do the submission one by one. So after that little fix, it works and looks like a series, amazing!