what doesnt work very well?
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There are a lot of organisms that can be identified from blurry photos, by people who are very familiar with them. A blurry photo is better than no photo at all. They may encourage someone to go to the area and get a better photo if the organism looks particularly interesting. We donāt know what may be of interest to others. So post your blurry photos, especially if the organism is unfamiliar to you; it might be something rare, which has been the case with a couple of my blurry photos.
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I turn off auto-sync so I can control the first ID on my observations (pet peeve: donāt like outside IDs until I have a chance 1st). Iām not sure of persistent errors with auto-sync but I also donāt get the occasional blank observation anymore. Maybe thatās what doesnāt work well.
How auto-sync affects it? You id it and then upload observation. I saw multiple comments about turning it off and as I uploaded thousands of observations with it on, I had zero problems related to id, really donāt get what is bad about it.
Not sure how or if auto-sync caused the blank records. It doesnāt happen now. Could be upgraded app. I donāt use auto.
ID problems are real. Granted, they may only be a problem for me (see pet peeve above). Auto-sync will upload the form when you check done, like when you want to move on to a new observation. It doesnāt care if the SpeciesName is blank or is just Placeholder text. If you donāt have a data connection, you canāt pick a species. You can only enter Placeholder text. Another user can ID that record if itās uploaded and Placeholder names are not easily visible after an ID. Auto-sync will upload those incomplete records if it gets a data connection.
Maybe you always have a good data connection when in the field. I often donāt. You may also not care if youāre the 1st to ID your observations.
Oh, got it, yeah, I donāt upload anything in the field, and after reading forum, Iād be super afraid to lose photos if I worked directly from the app and without connection.
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auto sync or auto upload, does not work well if youāre adding observations fast in the field or dealing with poor cell connectivity. It also broadcasts your location in real time which i am not a huge fan of. It sounds like Melodi is adding the observations at home later from photos, in which case yeah auto sync will cause no problems. I mean, i always leave it off and really donāt like it, but thatās why it is optional. I just wish it defaulted as off as it leads to these very issues such as people thinking the app does not work without cell service. In fact it works great without cell service you just canāt look up species names you havenāt used before.
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Thatās a big thing for me, too. Just because I donāt have the means to identify something, or someone else doesnāt, does not mean that nobody has the means. In my eyes, no matter how poor the image quality is, itās better than nothing, and if enough people disagree, I just remove the picture then. Itās still a documentation without the picture.
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Honestly, only recently did I have this realization. Not that people could see my observations, I knew full well that there was a community and that all of my posts could be seen. But in my own way, I didnāt really understand the depth of what I was doing. The ācommunity science projectā aspect of iNaturalist didnāt hit me like it shouldāve. I thought it was the research grade observations that separated the community science project from the rest of iNaturalist, so wrong IDs didnāt really matter. But those dubious observations can get to research grade if the wrong person agrees with it. My observations are in the 2000ās and good chunk of them have got to be dubious, I had a bad habit of hastily identifying things in the field by eyesight with whatever the computer vision gave me and hoping someone would either agree with it or correct it. Iāve been working on changing my habits and fixing/deleting old observations, Iād rather be a part of the community than keep trying to use it as some kind of identification tool. Iām with you on your journey to becoming a better iNatter.
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I think using the identifying tool is really helpful, if the photo is clear enough, and can be very useful for learning to identify things on your own. Thatās how itās gone for my kids, at least. Enough guidance with the identifying tool, and then you donāt need it much anymore with a lot of things. But you have to have a grasp of when to not use it or know to investigate to make sure it actually is working right and all that.
Itās good to know that I am not the only one who minimized the value of a lot of the elements of iNaturalist, because as it was for me and also you, itās a genuine mistake that you have to learn from.
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I completely agree and Iāve learned a lot with iNaturalist, though I honestly have this creeping suspicion that Iāve developed a local reputation for overusing the identification tool. As much as I love walking through the forest identifying things, Iāve chilled with it and havenāt been posting things at species level as much. Iāve also stopped using CV to speed up the identification process of things I can identify in the field myself. Less observations have been making it to research grade status lately, especially observations that I actually put effort into identifying myself almost never make it to research grade. This changes when I go out of state. Now, this could just be because Maryland is very heavy with iNaturalist users and less of my posts are seen, but that guilt we both share makes me want to believe itās because nobody trusts my identifications. I really donāt want to be that kind of user, I mean honestly I believed that was correct use of iNaturalist before, but now Iām hugely embarrassed of the way I carelessly posted things. Iām sure you had a similar experience because honestly, writing one of these apology letters crossed my mind.
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Even though itās fall already, with current flow of new users, almost nothing is ided because we only have a few iders, and most of those we have are in easier groups, so Iām sure itās not your fault. Also some new users-iders are agreeing with cv a lot, so itās much faster to get RG with cv, but itās also likely to be wrong.
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In that case, maybe I should get a little more confident in IDing things for iNaturalist. Iām a forager so I have to be 100% confident in the things I find, because I eat them. But when it comes to identifying things for other people, especially on websites like iNaturalist, I lose all confidence completely. Itās weird, almost like I know for a fact that Iām looking at say an American sycamore and thereās nothing else it could be, but somehow I just canāt hit that agree button because āwhat if itās not?ā. I wonder if anyone else has that issue.
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Sure, I think itās a sign of a responsible ider! I also hesitate a lot about what I see from photos.
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That is the despair and the joy of iNat (for us naturalists not scientists)
Lurching from I know it is that and NOT that to discovering new to me species. And starting again.
But only in the last few days I have found an iNatter who specialises in freshwater crabs, then one for African Drosera. The range of skilled identifiers is huge!
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I understand that feeling. I personally think thatās kind of lazy, of other people, to do that, if thatās what theyāre doing. Iāve had people say āthis observation is bad, I canāt tell what it isā, and they seem relatively annoyed. But those same people donāt even try to identify other observations of mine, of the same species, that have very clear pictures. It seems sort of pointless to complain at all, if they arenāt really worried about identifying them anyways. It seems to me like they just want to complain about something. Maybe Iām reading into that the wrong way, but multiple people have done that. They complain about low quality, but never even touch the high quality ones. It baffles me, but to each their own.
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What practices have you changed since the apology?
Thanks,
Patti
also, a reminder that there is no āfrassingā or other such photo-judginess on iNat, there is no obligation for anyone to take āprettyā or in-focus photos. If you are certain something canāt be identified you can add a coarser ID (usually a non-disagreeing one is best) and mark it as āno further ID neededā but please do not do this if you arenāt sure.
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I like to be generous with what I consider identifiable. Usually when I take pictures with a lot of species in it, for example, I try to identify everything I can possibly see and then add it as an observation. Lots of people donāt like that, but itās not against guidelines or anything. I feel like that fits in very well with the discussion, because many people have standards that donāt abide by the guidelines, and they navigate iNaturalist based on those standards rather than the actual guidelines.
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oh i love doing that, i like to go back and search old observations for new plants i didnāt notice before or else couldnāt identify then but can now. Iāve had a couple of people complain too but i just ignore them and if they add a dissenting ID i just reject it (which i donāt do otherwise). I do wish there were a way to tag where the individual in the photo is, kind of like how you can tag faces in facebook. I think that would be helpful for this kind of thing and also potentially would help with training the identification algorithm.
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