No feedback from any staff yet. A summary of the discussion so far and more thoughts follow.
- Posting non-observation images for iNat journal posts as observations on iNat is a hack that is used by some people in some situations but is discouraged by some as well. There are no stated rules against it and staff likely has not publicly addressed it.
- The primary reason for making such “observations” is to keep iNat related info on iNat and not lose it when URLs change or images are no longer hosted on another site. Some think hosting on other sites is reasonable. Others are worried about the potential loss of data and images if hosted elsewhere, especially in the long-term.
- The images on iNat could have a URL change that could also break journal posts and this has happened in the past. If iNat planned to do this again, they would hopefully have learned from the problems caused last time and create a script to update all links to photos on iNat journal posts, comments, etc.
- A test posting shows that you can make an observation without a location and date (and/ or use private location). This plus marking many DQA fields “no” should mostly hide these journal image storing “observations” to keep them out of anyone’s way.
- External comments suggest using screenshots of online maps may be problematic from a copyright standpoint. For example, even iNat maps have a copyright statement barely visible at the bottom.
Proposed best practices if this hack is used.
- Use only for images that are your own and that can’t be made into a proper observation. Examples include taxon distribution maps, iNat function screenshots, data representation (graphs/charts), and combined images of multiple taxa or observations for comparison.
- Include an explanation in the notes and a link to the journal post.
- Hide or remove the location and use DQA fields to make the “observation” unlikely to show in most searches.
I’ve updated my example iNat journal image storing “observation” here. A second example is here.