I cant find any topic that includes what I have inmind
Photos submitted to iNat can’t be more than 20mb in file size. All large photos submitted to iNat are resized so that the longest edge is no more than 2048 pixels. Personally, if my photos are larger than that, I export my photos at final size (longest edge 2048 ) from my photo software, rather than submit large photos to iNat and use up iNat’s bandwidth and have iNat resize them.
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From existing/closed discussions I have extracted the following: any photo exceeding 2048 px in any dimension will be reduced proportionally upon import to 2048 on the longest side and its megadata removed. And the resulting altered photograph that iNat stores will be labelled the “original”.
Is this correct?
Now a question of my own. Most questions regarding sizing were from people concerned with images larger than the iNat standard dimension. But I found nothing regarding images smaller than that standard 2048 maximum. Are smaller images ENLARGED is my question. Because in a lot of cases my images would I believe be essentially unusable. I have received no feedback about the images I am submitting so I assumed they are ok. Maybe you should have some standard image quality feedback section (I am thinking of a checklist with references attached) on the standard information page, referring to summaries you have created regarding image treatment that every person should know.
Lastly I have seen nothing about resolution. I practically always resize to 300 px because I am dealing with images that use relatively few px from the original in the camera image.
Have the developers considered resizing the photos on the client-side? That would save bandwidth for both iNat and for users (who might well be in the field with slow and/or expensive data plans). I think this is straightforward to implement in Javascript.
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Whether 300 px is enough will depend on what kind of organism you are observing and whether you are losing details important for IDers in resizing your images. To offer IDs for plants photographed from a distance, I often need enlarge to the maximum to try to pick out diagnostic details.
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This actually happens in the mobile apps, but that’s mostly to a) use up less data for the user and b) make it easier to transmit when the connection isn’t great. We don’t do it on the client side for the web. I’ll note that it’s not a big deal if you’re using an creative commons license (which I do), iNat doesn’t pay for bandwidth for those. I’m not resizing my photos to save iNat money, I just do it to save bandwidth overall. Seems cleaner that way.
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Twenty millibits? You mean 20 MB, right?
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