When changing the photos displayed on the about page, you are presented with photos that include observation that are not research grade. I just noticed it on my observation as it is the first one for the taxon https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/584112-Dovyalis-lucida but I am not absolutely sure I am right yet. Shouldn’t the photos only come from research grade to avoid it misleading people? What would happen if I gave it a default photo from my ob. and it was later confirmed as a different species?
I have noticed this too. It might be better to sort them and display RG photos first. I guess its on the onus of the person adding the photo to know what they’re doing and for Curators to fix or modify things lately. I however don’t mind that non-RG photos are available.
It there any way to change the photos once set? I found this issue, and also cases where i hit save before realizing that the best pic wasn’t first, so it didn’t show as the iconic pic.
@andrewgillespie In the photo curation modal, you will see at the top Photos from Observations. Click on the down arrow and you can select RG Observations. I think RG obs should be the default rather?
@KitKestrel - to change photos:
Under the graphs on the right is the Curation button - click! - choose Edit photos.
The modal pops up and away you go.
To make a different picture the default one (the one that shows on thumbnails etc.), click and drag to the first position.
Save.
Ta dah :-)
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It stays there as one of the default photos and has to be manually changed out with a different image.
Agree, should default to RG
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For many species of plants, the only available photos may be of cultivated ones and these cannot be RG for that reason alone! For many species of insect (especially from places other than N. America or Western Europe), iNat may only have a single user capable of giving an authoritative ID, so these will never be RG either, but it would seem a shame not to use the photos to illustrate the species.
Fair point.
Sure, but provided they are correctly identified, of course. Nobody is likely to confuse a potato and a carrot, but for the difficult insects you could easily have misidentified species ending up leading to more misidentification. So the photos should automatically be filtered by research grade and have the other options in the the drop down menu.
Yes, but nothing is perfect and the best we can hope for is to be able to fix errors when they occur. I have seen plenty of misidentified RG obs. Usually this is a result of the uploader agreeing more or less uncritically with an ID suggested by another user. There’s a continuum of cases as to what extent the agreement is uncritical. Trusting another particular user’s opinion is not much different to trusting a particular published revision or guide, all of which are fallible to some extent anyway. I’m known as an authority on NZ beetle ID, and there aren’t many others in the same category on iNat, so why shouldn’t another user choose to agree with my ID suggestion of a NZ beetle? Not doing so would prevent RG for some obs that are very valuable.
Edit: Just correcting “acses” to cases above!
Since making the last comment, a fine example has come up of “uncritical” ID agreement:
https://inaturalist.nz/observations/24478046
It isn’t even a beetle (though I am known more generally as an IDer of NZ insects) and the person who agreed isn’t exactly an iNat “beginner” (he is a board member of iNaturalist.nz!)
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