Self-rating system for audio and visual observations

[paul_dennehy]

I wonder if the quality of a photo uploaded to iNat and its identifiability are even related. Obviously, given a bad photo and a good photo of the same subject, the good photo will be more easily identifiable. But what I mean is that, at least for insects, some of the tiniest subjects attract the attention of extremely dedicated photographers, who post hundreds of gorgeous 5-star pictures of 1-mm beetles that simply aren’t likely to be identifiable due to the inherent difficulties in identifying tiny bugs (many require dissection, etc.). On the other hand, the “big showy” bugs, which attract the attention of less-than-dedicated photographers, often get posted in the form of blurry 1-star images of the wrong side of the bug pictured through a screen door with a smudge on the lens, but are still perfectly identifiable because of how distinctive and unique the bug is. So oddly, I don’t think I’d sort photos by quality as an identifier, because I’d expect these two factors to cancel each other out- the best quality macro photos to disproportionately feature “leave it at genus, needs dissection” bugs, and the worst quality blurry cell phone pics to disproportionately favor “wow, that might be a terrible picture, but I can tell it’s a luna moth anyway” bugs. Someone trying to get their cell phone to focus on something from 10 feet away probably isn’t aiming the camera at a Nepticulid, and someone with a $15,000 photography setup probably isn’t bothering to post their 500th luna moth photo. So in the end I suspect the “identifiability” of both high and low quality photo sets posted to iNat may be surprisingly similar. It would be interesting to figure out a way to test this hypothesis, as this is just based on my anecdotal experience identifying. But usually the set I’m “wading through” and the set I find that I can identify do not differ in their average photo quality.