For what it’s worth, here’s the blog post which has today’s smartphone photography webinar embedded in it. We had a pretty good audience of over 4k people, which was cool! We’ll try to publish shorter clips for people who don’t want to sit through an hour long talk. ;-)
There are so many reasons someone would post a blurry photo. Just learning how to use a camera. Not a photography expert. Handicapped. Can’t afford good equipment. Need time to learn how iNat works and how to take good photos. Not sure what experts can or can’t ID. This one is something I learned with my early bird photos. I put them on iNat and was astounded by the knowledge of birders who could ID some horrible photo and explain why they could ID it as well. So I always put my still sometimes very bad bird photos on the site. There are so many resources and journals on how to identify, how to take photos that show what is needed to ID species and they are there for a reason. The vastness of iNat can be intimidating.
I handle bad photos by saying that I can’t ID from the photo but not that it can’t be identified from their photo. Learned that the hard way thanks to Chris Schmidt. I give links to any journal posts or iNat information that could help them in the future. I enter the best ID I can manage and, if I know one, I tag any experts who are willing and able to take a look. The more information you can give someone, the more confident they will become using iNat.
Bad photos. Been there, done that. Will do again. Because who knows what someone can ID that you can’t.
Sometime bad photos are good enough. If they are too bad, I sometimes delete mine, although since I’m more of an identifier, I tend not look at my own past obs. Those were the observations of 2023 before I were suspended due to the age limit.
I hope that people can be encouraged by using inat. I guess I’m not that frustrated at bad photos, because it’s everyone who can use inat. I would never want to discourage someone new. Or someone not so new who for whatever reason hasn’t learned good techniques
I think people have some very different reasons why they might be using inat leading to different approaches. Kids who don’t know much. People forced to use it for class (I’ve seen the outcomes, often in the “unknown” category)
First and foremost I am a nature photographer for art. Learning about bugs and identification is an effect of that love for photography. I did not set out to love bugs but they are such ever-present subjects they soon became my focus, and then I had to learn about them. But having art as the main purpose means the knowledge/id part is more secondary. Or- I could back this up a bit to say that a love of parks and hiking and protecting natural spaces led to photography and how I take photos, all of which alongside the art aspect affects how useful any photos are for science/id
I’ve changed how I operate because of inat. I’ve gotten some nice comments on how to take photos of important features (such as the underside of mushrooms). But much more than that, just using the platform has gotten me in a different mindset throughout the process. I take more pictures showing organisms from different angles. I break my rules of minimal interactions with nature to flip over dead bugs or capture the lip shape of live snails (then put them back). My workflow is different (photos to be uploaded get one star while sorting, to be uploaded before I finish sorting/editing). Now I have over a thousand observations and identifications
That’s just me. And I still would say that my priorities are nature-loving > photography > science. I wouldn’t want to ask someone to become a different person to participate in inat. But maybe if they can see how nice it is here they can expand how they operate
Oh dear, I might be one of those. If I see a new species, and even if I don’t get good photos I will upload them. In low light conditions and with very active ants they are extremely hard to capture clearly. And because they’re so small the photos need to be cropped. Anyway, I do occasionally get a great photo of an ant!
With most recent camera phones they are unnecessary.
Speaking as a working plant taxonomy academic researcher I run across really poor photos all the time as the group I work in is, in general, a difficult suite of species. I usually answer such poor quality photos with: “the photo has insufficient information to ID to species” and leave it at that. On occasion, I’ll suggest how to take better photos of these plants and what characters are of importance.