I vet MANY Odonata records in California and Mexico. But, I live WAY out in the mts. and have very slow Internet and it costs me extra to use a lot of data… I imagine there are others in far off places with this same problem. Is there a way to encourage folks to crop their images to show the organism, not a lot of sky and other background?
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You an leave a polite comment asking them to crop pics in future observations and explaining why it can helps IDers. But there’s no requirement that observers do so.
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I imagine having an in-house image editor would help with this. It seems like the Android app allows for some minor photo editing, but this same feature isn’t available on desktop, and as far as I know not on iPhone either. Really, there is an issue with platform parity with iNaturalist in general, but that’s an issue for another topic.
Otherwise, there isn’t really anything else to be done except for ask politely, as @cthawley says.
If you’re loading from desktop it’s a simple affair to process the images in other software first (often a good idea in any event). The apps are a different story.
Via mobile you can always simply take the photo like normal with the regular photo app, crop//edit, and load the images into iNat from your phone’s pictures folder.
Regarding parity, there is an ongoing project to make a new unified mobile app from the ground up, but it’s taking a while.
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Oh, I do that, often having to use photoshop to bring them out of the shadows. My problem is having to load such a large image in the first place. I’ll start asking more folks…but that takes time and when you’re vetting a LOT of images…
It’s very easy to crop an image on an iPhone.
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I do most of my photography with a camera rather than smartphone, and the final part of my editing process is to the reduce the image size. I still have the raw image, so I’m not losing anything, but when it comes to the final image I rarely need to have a full rez shot.
Generally for online use, presentations, iNat, etc I make the final image no more than 10 inches on the longer edge and keep it at 300dpi. In Photoshop you have a quality slider when saving jpgs that ranges from 1-12 (12 ‘best’). I usually set this at 10. That generally results in an image that’s between 1.2 and 3.5 MB. If I’ve used something like Topaz DeNoise on a grainy image the final image size is smaller.
If I’m printing large things like posters and such, or for printed publications I’ll leave the final images full sized.
But I can’t crop it before it downloads…I don’t have to have to download a file when the dragonfly is but a tiny speck in it. Thanks James.
If only others would do something similar. I wish iNat could somehow have a pop-up or something asking folks to crop to the thing they want identified in at least one of the images!
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Yes, there are many ‘repeat’ observers, so this might work…
I was indicating that for other observers who do use an iPhone for photography, there’s really no reason to not crop an image if it needs it. The edit function, including cropping, is really easy on those phones (at least on the later models). Maybe the users aren’t aware of that capability. Or they don’t bother taking the extra step of editing before submitting to iNat.
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