As mentioned in 2022 “Change text on edit observation page to assist photo removing”
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/change-text-on-edit-observation-page-to-assist-photo-removing/29501/1
the process is too confusing to be used by regular users.
As mentioned by @cthawley “Trying to explain the process via comments is very frustrating and rarely results in pics being removed, likely at least in part because it is pretty counterintuitive.”
and by @tiwane “I agree it should be improved, it’s confusing.”
I was told a couple years ago (I think before that 2022 post) the way to get rid of a photo was to click on the (i) symbol on the photo. Obviously, that is not the best way to do it, but without a clear user interface that’s the best we can do sometimes.
Reading your post @pisum I now suggest a better short-term fix would be to change the delete I used to merely unlink the photo, then let the background process clean it up if necessary. I assume a structure where the system tracks links to the photo is going to be too much of a change. I also understand such a change might be in conflict with other operations such as deleting a user which deletes all the user’s data. (And that leads to yet another long topic.)
Another really easy short-term fix would be to change the warning when you try to delete the photo. Instead of the message: “Are you sure you want to delete this photo?” change the message to be: “Are you sure you want to delete this photo? Deleting this photo will remove it from all other observations duplicated from this observation.” No, I don’t really like that long message either. Does the system track when an observation has been duplicated? If so, only bring up that longer error message on duplicated observations.
By the way, the last place I worked this would be treated as a bug because there are no clear instructions that stop a user from accidentally deleting data.