In doing IDs for others on the web when I wasn’t sure, I used to painfully snip the image and upload to a separate instance of iNaturalist sometimes cropped to emphasize the organism in question (the Suggestions tab is much less reliable for some reason). But now for the same use case, I point my phone at the screen to see what CV comes up with. Much faster, and the CV doesn’t seem to get confused by the fact that the pictures is made up of a grid of tiny square pixels.
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That’s a smart use of technology. I assume you mean the iNaturalist phone app, not Seek.
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That’s a great idea. However one clarification – at first I thought you were using this method to ID iNaturalist observations as an identifier, which would be a sort of cheat. I realize you’re referring to random photos people send you. I’ve done the same process you describe but I’ll use your trick now!
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Yes that is what I mean.
I use it well identifying as well and don’t consider it a cheat–but, I only try to identify species that I’m already familiar with and mostly stick to my own geography. It’s more like–they called it x but it sure looks like y to me, let’s see what iNaturalist CV thinks. So, kind of like a second opinion. Also, in the field I will see something which I know but can’t remember the name of (I assume this happens to everyone!) so I use CV to trigger my memory which is similar to using it when I confirming/IDing other people’s stuff.
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I do those too.
FWIW, the app takes your current location into account so if the photos were taken elsewhere it may not provide an accurate ID and/or may not get down to species and such.
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Yes, I didn’t think of that–will definitely need to take that into account. I do mostly ID in my own region, but I assume CV considers location in a more granular way.