I just want to mention that I post a number of my iNat photos on Facebook, Instagram and some others sites, for my Oregon dunes and radio work (including some used to advertise presentations I do for other organizations who post those event announcements on their sites), so doing an image search could show some of my photos online, but I am the person who took the photos. So I think this alone needs to be looked at carefully when an image is returned. I’m guessing I’m not the only person posting here who might also use his/her photos in other locations on the internet.
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There’s probably lots of bird photos in iNat that are also found in eBird/Macaulay Library, as well.
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Those are all good points about investigating photos via reverse images search. Finding a photo elsewhere on the web should never be the sole determinant for suspecting a copyright violation. As another example, I started out on iNat by importing photos from my Flickr account. In the case of imports, this generates a link to the Flickr version on each photo page, making it easy to see the connection, but some I ended up uploading to both places so the link is missing. Some of my Flickr images have subsequently been used on other websites (mostly based on the CC license on them). I hope people consider these sort of things before flagging stuff on iNat.
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Good point, it’s part of the FAQ I posted a few weeks ago: https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000202750-what-if-i-think-an-image-or-sound-as-been-stolen-
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I have encountered “legitimate” image search results (ie, those where the observer posted in multiple places and one of those other locations off iNat came up) in potential copyright cases a few times. One way I have used to distinguish them fairly easily is to check the posting/upload dates. If the posting of a photo on another site happened years ago, but the observation on iNat is from dated as observed today or a couple days ago, I feel comfortable flagging for copyright. If both dates are from a similar time frame, it’s a good sign to look more closely.
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Can you say what site that is? I’d like to see if they stole any of mine.
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I have also found iNaturalist observations which Mongabay subsequently used to illustrate stories. In these cases, they credited the photographer, so it was easy to see that the photo was on iNaturalist first.
In broader terms, if someone licenses their photo for free or non-commercial use, it should be no surprise to see that photo appear somewhere online.
I have a scenario where the same photo was uploaded twice to two different accounts, and the upload timestamps are identical (so it’s not obvious that account A stole from account B or vice versa). Is that something you would flag, and if so which one?
I think it’s probably more likely that the users know each other IRL, saw the lizard at the same time, but only one of them got a photo and shared it with the other rather than a deliberate copyright violation. This is the first observation for one of the users (made the same day as the account), and the second observation for the other (as far as I could tell that account hadn’t been touched in several years).
I might post a message on both records: “This photo also appears in the following iNat record (insert URL). Only one of you took it. Which one?”
Then see if one gets deleted.
Thanks again @cmcheatle for your excellent tutorial.
Unfortunately Google lens is no longer as useful as it used to be, and nowadays I can rarely find images that are blatantly copied when looking in there.
I’d like to add that new users that upload a bunch of photos of different crop sizes and aspect ratios are often using copied images. In these cases, one can usually see a few observations using the user’s phone, and this is reflected in the EXIF data. However, when one looks at the EXIF of the different aspect ratio images, they rarely have anything other than dimensions.
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That can happen with legitimately cropped images too, depending on the software and settings used.
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Yes, I don’t think there’s any definitive way.
In that case, I guess I have been stealing images for the last 3 years / 7 thousand+ observations, and nobody noticed, including myself.
I crop my images to whatever size seems appropriate and/or whatever is aesthetically pleasing. I don’t pay much attention to the exact size or aspect ratio. The only significance this has is that it says I have no advanced photo editing software, only basic skills at using the tools available to me, and not much inclination to spend a lot of time fussing around with niceties like the precise aspect ratio for photos that I often have only taken for documentation purposes to begin with.
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BTW there’s a typo in the FAQ post header (and in the URL link): should be “has been stolen” rather than “as been stolen.”
Thanks! Turns out it was a mother and daughter, we’ll see if one gets deleted.
When they have permission to use the photo, they don’t need to delete anything. Sharing photos is permitted (though not ideal).
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Oh okay, thanks for the clarification. Duplicated observations aren’t an issue in terms of data quality?
No, it’s totally fine for two people to observe the same organism - see https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000209283-can-two-or-more-people-make-an-observation-of-the-same-organism-
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They could be, but that’s really an issue for end users. The community guidelines say:
" * Duplicate observations. They’re not ideal, but they’re usually due to oversight or bugs. Politely ask people to remove them but if they don’t, it’s not a big deal unless it becomes a habit. Keep in mind that observations of the same individual by different people are not duplicates. Those are two unique observations and don’t merit any kind of curatorial action."
But this situation isn’t really a duplicate in the strict sense. The only issue here is one user using another’s photo (which, if done with permission is ok, just not ideal).
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The term “duplicate” has multiple meanings on iNat and I’m not sure the guidelines make that entirely clear.
I can edit one of my own observations and click on Duplicate to re-use the photo and date/location data for another record if there is more than one kind of organism in the photo. I can also Duplicate a record and replace the photo with a different one to document another organism from same place/time. An observation might be a duplicate if one iNatter lets another iNatter use the same photo they used in an observation if both individuals observed the same thing at same time but only one took a photo. I might accidentally make a duplicate if I upload the same photo for the same organism more than once.
As @cthawley noted, two iNatters using their own cameras to photo the same something at the same place/time is not a case of duplication although I’ve seen it called that.
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