There are 128,000,000 observations on iNat that need IDs. I’m not sure why anyone would get hung up on a blurry photo. Just move on to the next one. The single second it takes to recognize a photo as too poor to identify seems pretty irrelevant to me.
Welcome to the community!
Your intention to post with comments is spot on. We will appreciate the extra effort that you have put in.
They are kind thoughts.
I have noticed that as the day progresses, the quality of my photos drops off relative to the state of my body eg, the ability to bend down, make the extra effort. The thing is I don’t always recognise it is happening and I keep going when I should stop.
A quick thank you for the comments that you do leave. I much appreciate them, even if I am a slow learner.
The fact that you can post “low quality photos” on iNat and nobody will give you hell about it is one of the single greatest qualities of the site. If you go in any birding group, people now start every second post with “apologies for a terrible photo”, because a few elitist photographers have made half of the internet a playground to stroke their egos, instead of a communal space for sharing the interest in nature. This has had actually a detrimental effect because we are clearly missing rarities because people take bad photos, never share them and never learn that it was a rarity and should have been shared.
Yes, identifier time is precious, but the “identify” interface is pretty well done to allow skipping over bad photos as far as I can tell, so the low quality photos shouldn’t really detract that much from the “high quality” ones, whatever that means.
I still can’t forget the rage when someone commented “please upload a better photo next time” on some of my observations from a place that, at that point, had ZERO iNat observations at all, in the middle of Peruvian jungle. Would that person be happier if we had nothing from that entire area because they wouldn’t have to look at my “bad photos”? How many users have we lost because of needless comments like that?
See something you don’t fancy on iNat? Unless it’s evidence of murder, just move on.
I think a lot of folks just getting into naturalism are unaware of just how many species exist where they are and how challenging identification can be. If someone posted a single blurry photo of a dead bear lying on its back from 10 feet away, I’d be able to identify the type of bear; so if I post a blurry photo of a dead ant on its back from 2 feet away, the ant people should be able to identify that as well. I hear hilarious descriptions from people irl all the time expecting me to identify the moth they saw: “it was a long white one with brown stripes and a dot. What species is that?” The only way that question escapes your lips is if you have no concept of just how many extremely similar moths exist in your area. So I try to be understanding when people ask for IDs of photos that, to me, are clearly unidentifiable. Because it takes a lot of experience to even appreciate the challenge that identification can be.
sometimes the observer is some 13-year old city kid who doesn’t know an ant from an earwig. Or it’s that kid’s single mom rushing home after a 16 hour shift but she spotted something and took the best photo she could. if you can’t be nice, move on.
if a single user is uploading dozens of unusable photos then it may become a problem.
Providing strong feedback that will help them get better is not yelling at someone.
If the photographer never gets any pushback about the photos they’ll just keep doing it and wasting everyone’s time and using up data space.
Me too, only with plants. They usually start with “Well, it had green leaves. . .” then they pause, trying to remember if there was anything else distinctive about it, but can’t come up with anything except maybe, “that go like this.” (accompanied by a very vague hand gesture.)
So yes, I’m sure there are many people who don’t understand that a blurry photo may not be enough for ID.
We also need to remember that not everyone has clear eyesight to begin with. Some people only see an insect as a blur, and think it looks the same in their blurry photo as in real life.
Disclaimer: I didn’t read the whole thread, so maybe this is a duplicate.
I’m glad iNat does not delete bad photos like bugguide, but sometimes I wished iNat had a magical “bad photo” filter too.
Not just for IDing but mostly when browsing my own photos.
For this reason I started using the Photo quality observation field by @little_blue_heron.
I think the 1 to 5 rating, with focus on ID-ability and not beauty, is a perfect simple but accurate scale for me.
Maybe this could also be useful eventually to identifiers:
Observers can pre-tag unidentifiable pictures, and identifiers can filter those out.
But it’s pretty unrealistic that anyone will ever adopt this.
I think I will use photo quality to tag “5” level photos when I see them because there are some ant photos that just solve so many problems and really make it clear what the ant looks like.
I’d worry about making someone feel bad with any other ratings. And really I wouldn’t ever search for low quality photos. But filtering for those that are exceptionally good is useful.
My first experience was starting (in 2023) with the Android app, and only realizing, after observing it from my PC screen, that I’d been sending low-quality photos. Because outdoors, often in the sun, it’s difficult to judge from my phone screen which of the various photos I’ve taken are the best. Since then, I’ve given up using the app. I take many more photos and download them to my PC via USB cable at home to better select the best ones for a 24" monitor, which is perfect for my presbyopia. I then crop them if necessary (and resize them to reduce bandwidth).
Perhaps it would be helpful to add a popup to the app that warns you when you’re about to send a blurry photo.
Also, if ongoing poor photo quality means they never get any IDs because no ID is possible, that’s likely to be highly discouraging. If making such comments (as nicely as possible) shows that people are looking at their photos but really can’t do anything with them, maybe that’s less discouraging?
I have a few observations of ants and I took one of a spider yesterday and thought about this discussion.
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@myrmepropagandist, I wonder if this enough to be ID’d to genus or species? Maybe it just got overlooked.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/298995480
- It’s with a $500-ish TG-7.
- Those are large ants (~8mm)
- I think I was on at least one knee.
- Those two photos where the better out of at least 10.
- I cropped them to about 2048px (so iNat doesn’t resize them).
- I cropped them in Lightroom ($20/mo with Photoshop). It can be done for free, but it’s more work. If taken on a phone, it’s easy to crop.
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For this other one, I wasn’t going to put my knee on the ground next to these. I used my phone and I did bend down. It did get ID’d to Genus, which made me happy because of the effort I put into it. These photos are the better of at least 10 photos. I followed a similar process like the previous observation but in the phone.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/367542047
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For this spider’s 7 photos, I took 50+ photos (using focus bracketing) with my macro lens and GX9. Spray and pray as it is said and selected the better ones. My butt was on the ground and my face about 2ft from the spider.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/387414979
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I’m just trying to contribute an additional perspective. Everyone here has made good points already. Behind every good photo there are many bad ones, and the gap between a unidentifiable observation and an identifiable observation can be so wide and different between organisms. Not everyone wants to take a good photo and that’s fine. And not everyone knows all the intricacies some people do to get a photo they are satisfied with.
Now if we could do something about those leaf miner photos… :D
That’s a good point. We rarely give constructive feedback.
I agree with the premise of this comment, but not the way it is worded. First you worded it as
I would rather it be worded as giving them some gentle, kind, and constructive advice. The way it was originally written is implying what they are doing is intrinsically wrong and deserving of scolding. (I’m not saying you meant that, but that is how “pushback” comes off in this situation.) This is not the case. Uploading blurry or poor photos to iNat isn’t a big deal; why act like it is such a pain when really it is a minor thing anyone can sacrifice, knowing people are taking the time to do something with nature.
Now sure, if it is a consistent happening and if one is worried this might introduce bad habits and be discouraging for the user, lightly letting them know how they can take better photos, not just asking them to take better photos, is a great, charitable thing to do.
Personally, I don’t quite like wording someone using iNaturalist in a completely legal way as wasting everyone’s time. It doesn’t have to waste anyone’s time as with one simple swipe you are past that observation. After all, iNat is specially set up for people to only identify that they want.
Also, if creating a supportive environment for all skill levels is too much for anyone they don’t have to engage. If you are choosing to spend your time identifying having to skip past an observation is just part of the process not a waste of time. To understand this you have to understand somebody else is on the other side of the screen.
Of course, I know all too well how easy it can be to think only about the inconveniences to yourself in situations like these and not about other people behind their screens trying for what might be their first time to enjoy nature or whatever the case may be.
For me, I feel like the reason I used to get frustrated about poor photos while identifying is because I know it isn’t right to be upset and rather I should try and encourage the users but I would rather just ignore and move on so I resort to taking my frustration with the sacrifice of time one has to make to be a kind person all the time out on a completely innocent user. Of course this is wrong so whenever I would feel like this I would take a breath and save the observation so I could deal with it if I felt up to it later. If I never want to I can just move on having barely lost one second of time. Honestly, losing it on the pretense of a user potentially gaining a lifetime enjoyment and the best hobby/therapy of all time I’m glad to have “wasted” my one second.
Is it possible to add something to the software indicating due to the quality of the photo, ID might be difficult? It could give the option of trying another photo.
If you would ever like to feel better about blurry ant photos, feel free to browse non-research grade microscopy photos 
I try to be understanding, and many are clearly photos from students required to upload something, and/or limitations of equipment, but it’s usually the reason I have to take a break from IDing.
For microscopy IDs, I will often use the “cannot be identified further” annotation for this when possible.
I agree! This is why I mostly stopped IDing on BugGuide after years on there. I’m interested in bugs, not photography, so if a picture is adequate for identification, I don’t care if it’s Nat Geo worthy or a bit blurry, I find it useful. If a photo is a 50000 MB stacked image taken with a $70000 camera setup and edited with $500 software but shows a bug that needs dissected to be identified, I find it less useful. I wouldn’t describe either of them as wasting my time, but BugGuide seems to really value photo quality more than I do, and it seems to lack my interest in archiving lower quality photos of a bug if they already have “better ones”. Honestly iNat’s lack of what I perceive to be photography snobbery is one of the things that attracted me here. I think the blurry blob photos are sort of a fun challenge, and I’m more inclined to comment saying “cool find!” or other words of encouragement if a user seems to be struggling a bit with the picture taking part of the experience. Some new users don’t even know that anyone else can see their pictures, so having the first comment they see be some stranger on the internet telling them how to take better bug pics on their phone must be extremely jarring.