Same species shows two different thumbnails on same screen

Bug Reports
1

Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.

Platform (Android, iOS, Website):
Desktop / Windows

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):
N/A

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) :
Firefox

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):

image
image1371×1276 170 KB

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

Step 1: Suggest an ID on this observation of Harmonia axyridis
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/264988314. Do this from the page itself rather than the identification queue.

Step 2: There are two different thumbnails shown for this species - the one that appears in the page after I select the species, and the one that shows up in the dropdown panel as associated with the species.

When I first hit this in my ID queue, the thumbnails matched, but made me question whether I had the correct ID so I opened in a separate tab and noticed the two disparate images.

Step 3: That’s it!

This may be a non-issue, in case it’s related to something as simple as database refreshing on a regular schedule – as it looks like the photos have been getting modified on this species. (Last update shows 07:31 PM UTC today; that’s about eight hours ago.) However, from the tracked changes on photo changes, it’s difficult for me to follow which photo is meant to be the ‘correct’ first place one from the two appearing.

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This is new, intentional behavior: https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/106449-better-image-matches-photo-similarity-update-to-computer-vision-suggestions

2 Likes
3

Oh - that’s right, I forgot about that change. Thank you for reminding me. Before this is closed though, this makes me wonder if, as an identifier, some additional review of the UX for how and when these images show up might be beneficial, especially since I see two different sets of images on the same page, which is confusing, and some of those images are different from what I see in the identification queue. I understand why it’s happening now, just find the experience confusing when coming at this from an identifier rather than an observer.

I’ll be this seamless on the mobile app; it definitely threw me tonight.

4

I agree that this actually represents two confusing outcomes of this change:

One would think that the same taxon would have the same photo on the same page, but this isn’t necessarily true. Now a taxon can be represented by two different photos in the same context which gives an impression that there may be a disagreement when there is not.

It also increases the chances that multiple taxa will be shown with the same photo which increases confusion. This was always a possibility due to some nested taxa having the same first photo (which was not optimal to begin with), but now the problem occurs whenever a taxon has another taxon’s photo in any of its photos.

2 Likes