I don’t know if my non-curator opinion matters at all, but I really hope that you won’t limit the ability to change taxon photos to curators. As an avid identifier, I often run across rarely observed taxa as I go, including ones that don’t yet have a taxon photo (or even a taxon page, in some cases). It’s wonderful to be able to replace a low-quality, ancient photo with a beautiful new one that illustrates all the ID features, or to install a taxon photo for the first time when there’s an opportunity to do so for a rarely observed species. I really dislike the idea of having to petition a curator just to change a photo. Is the abuse really such a problem as to warrant creating a backlog of “change photo” requests? And the idea of limiting the number of photos that a user can submit for a given taxon for life is crushing. (Per day would be one thing, but for all time?)
It’s also important to keep in mind that experts aren’t necessarily curators, and vice versa, for many taxa.
Once there are something like (pulling a random number out) 20 or 50 taxon photos there is rarely a good reason to be adding more or changing the images around. Not no reason as there are always exceptions, but less and less of one at that point.
I’m not a curator, but one of the first things I did when I started IDing on iNaturalist in 2022 was add caterpillars to the taxon photos of a bunch of the eastern North American macromoths that only had adults in the taxon photos. There were tons of photos for those taxa and even a lot of caterpillar photos for many of them–it was just a long, repetitive process that hadn’t been done for many of the taxa.
I think it would be better to provide more guidance on the taxon photo page itself. At minimum, a large statement that says “these photos should clearly show the necessary identification characters and be typical and representative of the species” or something. Maybe include instructions that people who want to show off their unusual individuals or artistic photos should add those to projects like Albino, Leucistic & Melanistic Animals or projects for super pretty photos. (I don’t know if there are any of the latter, but I see no problem with having one.)
At most, I think the many previous Forum discussions about recommended taxon photo order could be used to create a few “recommended templates” that would show up on the selected photos side, so that editing the photos would involve dragging one into a specific space that was labeled “recommended: typical adult (side view)” or something. It wouldn’t be a guarantee that people wouldn’t add something weird, but I think it would make it rarer.
I agree, which is why this feature should be locked to a specific minimum number of observations. 10 000 would be a good start. It ensures that there are multiple high-quality pictures of the taxon around, avoiding the kind of situation you’re describing.
Then a cutoff total makes no sense.
If today’s photo of fruit is good for field marks - why should we not be able to replace the blurry iffy one which currently serves as taxon photo?
Or if today is, finally, a good picture of the Other Side of the butterfly wing?
Maybe something like the forum’s slow mode, if we can flag up feuding on taxon pictures. (You have had your turn, now wait a week before you tweak again) And if we can flag up - this taxon needs its pictures locked to show field marks.
There’s a big problem with that. Let’s say you’re an expert on a taxon, and a great photographer, and you take an expensive trip to go and photograph a rare species in that taxon, and you take the greatest photograph ever taken of that rare species, showing every important ID feature, and you’d like to add it as the taxon photo, since the taxon page doesn’t even have a photo yet…and you can’t, because it’s your own photo.
Why rob the good photographers and good observers on iNat of the ability to contribute good taxon photos, just because of a few instances of bad behavior? Why assume that everyone would do this for self-promotion, and not just because their photo illustrates the taxon well?
Fair enough; the “first photo” scenario was a faulty example. But maybe you’d like to replace an old, blurry photo with the better one you just took.
My point is that currently, letting most users edit taxon photos makes iNaturalist a more beautiful, more useful, and more fun place to be. By limiting that ability, you’d also limit the ability of non-curators to help fix instances of the kind of misuse that started the whole thread (and that abuse was just one of several bad behaviors that SatanFungi described).
That is true. I have changed a number of taxon photos, usually to replace an image taken from the web with an iNat observation. There have been no complaints about the changes I have made, but it must be said that they are taxa with few observations which attract little attention. I make it a rule, though, to never choose my own photos.
I’m not referencing an exact thing, I just picked the first group of sometimes-difficult-to-ID organisms that came to mind to use in a hypothetical.
Regardless of organism, the point stands: sometimes people do have a good reason to reject the community ID. Again, there’s a reason why that feature exists.
I’m not sure this would work very well. Both as someone’s minimum number of observations doesn’t mean much about the quality of those observations, and as that’s a huge number that a whole lot of people simply won’t have. Someone who doesn’t have much spare time to go look for their favorite [insert obscure group of insects here], but takes very good photos of rare species when they do, should probably not be excluded from being able to add taxon photos based on them not having loads of observations.
I believe this suggestion was about locking taxa with large numbers of observations, not limiting changing photos to users with that number of personal observations.
To be more constructive – you should have no problem relying on the community. If your photos are as useful as you claim, they will make their way to the taxon page in no time.
Right, I understood the hypothetical, and wasn’t trying to imply that you, personally, see yourself in these terms. All the same, you described exactly the kinds of arguments a self promoter would use to justify their hubris. And the community should strongly push back against that.
As a curator, I don’t want this either! There’s already enough open flags.
My suggestion was to limit the editing of photos at family rank or above to curators. I want people to continue to curate things at the species or genus level
Another solution would be to add a button that only curators can use to lock photos for taxa where people keep self promoting their own photos.
I strongly disagree that we should make it impossible for a user to add their own photo. There are many geographies and taxa that are not frequented on iNaturalist. I take photos of Hawaiian liverworts often and have added mine as the default photo as they are the only photos that exist!
As iNat will make the first RG observation the taxon photo, regardless of the quality, this leads to many very poor taxon photos which need to be changed. If somebody who is an expert in that group has good photos, we are doing a disservice to the community by not allowing those photos to be added.
Good thing I didn’t say one shouldn’t be able to do that, then. If it’s a considered decision, and open to review by the community, then please do go ahead. If the only reason is that you “took an expensive trip”, then please no, though.
This sounds like it could be an excellent solution for misuse/abuse situations - and perhaps the lock could be temporary (say, for one month or so)? That would address the problem situation (or problem user) without limiting the functionality for everyone else.