Sometimes low quality ant photos make me really angry. This is… irrational. And maybe a little funny to my husband when I call him over to look at how “terrible this photo of an ant is.”
It took me a bit to understand why it makes me so mad. I realized it kind of feels like the person who made the observation got to see the ant, but now I can’t it’s just a blurry photo, and the ant is too tiny to even really count the legs. It’s horrible. It’s like I’m being locked out!
I know that’s when I need to take a break and try to remember that not everyone has a fancy camera, and even fewer know how to use one well. (Yes, it’s possible to use clip-on lens or a magnifying glass, but that’s more work. And maybe seeing a blurry ant is better than no ant at all.)
I sometimes wish that more people would write about what they saw… what was the ant doing? Where was it going? Why did it catch your eye?
I suppose I’m just glad that people even notice ants at all and try to photograph them. I really appreciate the skilled macro-photographers who post their work the most. It’s a real gift and I’ve learned so many things.
This must be so much more painful for anyone who cares about… mites. (not that I don’t care about mites, but you know what I mean.)
as a fan of bugguide, i appreciate their ‘frass’ system of removing photos that are of low quality. i understand it goes against inat’s mission though, so i get why they don’t have such a system.
but there are a lot of almost comically blurry insect photos.
This kind of makes me want to create a project for blurry photos haha.
In all seriousness I understand your frustration but like you said, a bad observations is at least better than none at all
I get the frustration, but I’d rather have a blurry ant observation than no ant observation at all.
Every observation is a record that someone noticed something. Even if it can’t be identified beyond family or genus, it can still document where and when that organism occurred, and sometimes that’s useful in its own right.
Where I do agree is that a sentence or two of field notes can make a huge difference. If the photo isn’t diagnostic, tell us what you saw. Was it carrying prey? Nesting under bark? Following a trail? Flying? Those observations don’t require an expensive camera, and they can preserve details the photo couldn’t.
The really sharp macro photos are amazing, and they’ve taught me a lot. But I also think many of those photographers started with blurry photos. Encouraging people to keep looking at tiny things is probably the best way to end up with more great macro photographers in the future.
A lot of ant pics are useless for ID, whether it’s because it’s too far away and you cannot see details or it’s extremely blurry. Waste of data storage (yep, there is some cost to storage of data, especially large photos).
Sometimes I go through unknown observations and try to be as helpful as possible with impossible photos (asking questions like “is this an insect you’re trying to ID?” lol). Occasionally there will be something I am able to solve in spite of the poor photo but mostly it does get really frustrating, like you I’m often wondering “how do they expect anyone to know what this blurry spec is.” But I’m hopeful some of these folks will keep taking photos that get better and more useful for ID over time.
I can understand blurry photos of a small, fast-moving insect. I’ve taken a lot of them myself, though I don’t post them on iNaturalist. I’d be embarrassed to do so. What bugs me is blurry photos of dead shells on the beach. There’s really no good excuse for that.
May I please add to this list photos of branches annotated with the comment that there “was” a bird sat on it a minute ago, picture of grass similarly noted, pictures of distant birds that may or may not be a spec of dirt on the camera lens, etc, etc…
On another thread someone explained that cellphones are primed to see Human so they focus on The Shoe, That Person Over There, or The Hand. That first lesson to learn to focus on what you are looking at and fill the frame would go a long way to improving obs quality. And the second could be – tell us about this, fill in the notes.
My philosophy is if an out of focussed photo has the identifying feature, that trumps a well focussed image minus the identifying feature.
When I don’t know if a poor image would help, I usually put in the notes a comment asking whether it is id-able.
Recently I posted a very poor image which only reached genus level and when asked whether I should delete, the answer was leave it there as it was the first record for that region. So a poor quality image is better than none in some areas.
Obviously I am speaking broader than ants. But concerning ants, I’ve had some nasty bites, so I don’t like to get close to some of our Australian ants.
Idk, i feel a little bit on both sides. Sometimes the photo is truly truly horrendous. Then u think about it, some people are really really poor due to their country’s status etc.
I came to terms with it, and be like, “if i can ID this down to ssp. level, it means taxonomy in this field has advanced just that much”
What I find far more frustrating is when the observer didn’t really get to see the subject either - or even appear to show much curiosity about it at all. In particular, I’m always completely baffled by those observations of dead or immobile subjects which consist of just one photo of the underside - and nothing else. Why not take a few seconds to turn it over so you can see what it actually looks like?!
Just as frustrating as this are observers who over-indulge their own curiosity and present nothing but a single high-quality macro shot taken from some weird “artistic” angle - or showing, say, only the head. If you’ve got the photos, don’t be coy - just show us what you’ve got!
Or that some people would just take more of a basic interest in what they had an opportunity to observe. The observer’s focus can often be more of a concern than their camera’s.
I have mixed feelings as well. For my taxon/region of interest, I can usually identify blurry blobs to species based on knowledge of ranges/phenology (ie. no matter how blurry, there’s only one species that will give you the image presented).
But by doing so, am I just encouraging folks to submit even worse images? (“well, he pulled the rabbit out of the hat on that one, might as well submit these others…”)
I don’t think we need to blame poor photos on a country’s status. I only look at photos from Ontario, Canada and I see lots of very poor photos. I ID a lot of them. In many cases it’s relatively easy (see above), but for some groups with several similar species, it may require some extreme squinting and head scratching. You have to check that the observer hasn’t submitted a better photo of the same organism as a separate observation - I see that a lot. You also run the risk that the extreme processing that some phones/cameras do (noise reduction, interpolation, sharpening) can mess up fine details in the photo. A spot that is actually there on the organism may not appear in the photo because it was wiped out by the noise reduction software in the camera. I see some extreme crops where the pattern doesn’t match any known species, and you can see the distinctive pattern generated by photo processing taken too far (it starts to look like a child drew the picture with crayons - held between their toes). I can guess at what it is (like I said, there may be only one possibility for the date/location), but what about cases where there are two very similar species (one with the spot and one without)?
There’s also the question of whether observations with poor photos also have other issues (eg. incorrect date/location). All that second guessing can all get exhausting after a while, and I feel like I may be spending too much time on the observations with poor photos at the expense of others that have better photos.
Excuses for some of my own blurry fotos of non-moving organisms:
It’s a very hot, sunny day on the beach / in the desert. I can’t stay in the sun any longer. The phones screen is barely visible in the glare. I assume the shots i took are ok.
Battery is at 3%, just enough to make a single foto before the phone is shuting down. Then I see a lifer.
Yeah unfortunately a lot of my bug photos turn out unusable, and as such, there’s a major bias (both with me and iNat generally) towards larger, slower moving species. I think this is a microcosm of the charismatic species bias, because stuff that’s hard to see and photograph just doesn’t attract much interest.
I don’t have the chance to improve on this either, because I’m a farmworker. I have my phone, I’m on the clock, and therefore I don’t have the time or equipment to set up for a good photo. I just have to take what I can get, and I mourn the tons of cool species that I can’t photograph but I would like to share nonetheless. Tiny organisms are a huge part of the biodiversity on a farm, chronically understudied and underappreciated, and I’m just not in a position to help with this.
We can turn that argument around. Expert identifiers are volunteers and they’re few in number (compared to the number of observers). There are only so many hours in the day. Most of these experts are busy people and can’t spend every waking hour on iNat (nor should they be expected to). These very real limitations should also be recognized. If somebody does identify your observation for you, it means they took time out of their day to do you a favour.
Maybe submitting a ton of blurry pics and expecting experts to spend time on them and/or offer advice on how to improve them is unrealistic. I can’t tell why a particular observer consistently posts blurry photos - I’d have to ask a whole bunch of questions to try to figure out what the root cause is (and chances are it’s simple carelessness). Judging by how often the average observer responds to the questions I do ask, my guess is that lots of observers don’t even read the comments on their observations. I look at a lot of observations (hundreds per day). I have to weigh whether a particular observation/observer warrants the time it takes for me to type up a question/comment (and read whatever answer they provide). The time I give to one person is time that is no longer available for someone else.
For your bees, you have to remember that who sees your observations may be limited by the initial ID you put on them. For example, I identify butterflies. So when I do identification work, I start by filtering observations for those that fall under the set of lepidoptera families that constitute butterflies. If somebody posts an observation of a butterfly, and identifies it as “Insects”, I will never see it (unless someone else comes along and refines the ID to “Butterflies” or lower). Even if they identify it as “Butterflies and Moths”, I still won’t see it, because that’s higher than butterflies. Note that neither of those IDs are wrong - they just aren’t specific enough to get through the my filters. So the “wrong” initial ID could mean that your observation is stuck in limbo because it isn’t being seen by the right people.
If you have a bunch of bee photos that haven’t been identified, perhaps you could consider consulting a field guide and trying to identify them yourself. Even try just one or two. Maybe you can refine your initial ID just enough that an expert will see it. If you find that you hit a roadblock because something is missing from your photos, you’ll have your answer.
I wasn’t born with a talent for identifying butterflies. I started out identifying my own photos.