I know this topic has been discussed ad nauseum at this point, but one aspect that seems to be overlooked in the whole “blur anything marked dead” debates is that, at least as far as I can tell, the “Dead” annotation is not meant to be used automatically for images including a dead organism. It’s not a tag for the picture; it’s an annotation of the observation- “did this observer find the organism alive or dead”, not “is it dead in all or some of the pictures posted”
I think if some sort of tag/annotation/whatever for “disturbing images” were to be added, it would be something distinct from what is meant by the “Dead” annotation. “Dead” as an annotation on iNat does not mean “dead thing is present in the picture”, it means “subject organism was found dead by the user”. In entomology and botany, dead preserved specimens are frequently posted to iNat, but it has been explicitly stated on the forums several times that if the date and location of original live sighting are associated with the observation, it is correct practice to annotate as “Alive”, despite the organism being dead in the picture, as it was observed alive and then collected. For example: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/annotate-dead-or-alive/17537
“Dead” is used to indicate that the organism was dead when encountered, which can then be used to exclude the date of that observation when developing phenologies of the species (e.g. an observation of a dead adult Phigalia in a windowsill in July does not accurately represent the time when adult Phigalia occur alive in nature, which is exclusively December-April).
I find myself downvoting “Dead” annotations for pinned specimens that were collected alive all the time, as these observations do represent observations of live organisms, even if the evidence presented is of the preserved specimen. I know some users would like to use “Dead” as a way to say “the picture shows something dead” for whatever reason… they don’t want to see a dead specimen, they want a way to distinguish between in situ images and those that show something which may have faded colors, etc. But the way “Dead” is currently understood on iNat, this is a misuse of the annotation. Same applies to plants; if I remove a floret from a grass to take home and put under the microscope to count the veins, I’m posting a picture of a “dead” part of the plant, but I observed a live plant in nature, so “Alive” is the correct annotation. I could easily see someone applying this to charismatic vertebrates too: a photo of a deer you just shot and killed still represents an observation of a live organism, even if you killed it before taking the picture, so there’s a strong argument to be made that “Alive” is an appropriate tag in these cases too. And as much as it sickens me when someone kills a snake out of ignorance, and as much as I’d prefer not to see those images, I could see someone annotating such an observation as “alive” if the snake was observed alive before being killed. “Someone observed a live snake at this date and location” = “Alive”, even if what they did to it when they found it resulted in a dead snake for the photos. I think it’s worth considering what the “Dead” annotation means, because if it’s being used in some contexts to refer explicitly to organisms found dead but in other contexts to refer to organisms found alive as a tag for “Warning: Dead thing in Picture!”, then the annotation loses meaning.
If someone posted a feature request to add an additional annotation for “may contain graphic images”, I’d vote for it, though I doubt I’d ever bother to use it myself when implemented, because it would give an outlet for those who want to have a way to hide pictures of dead things without having them misuse the “Dead” annotation as a content warning button. If someone wants to mark all my pinned bugs as potentially offensive, be my guest… but please don’t do it by incorrectly annotating them as “Dead” observations.