I’m pretty new here and just found out about inaturalist some weeks ago. Now I just started to get some more active within uploading my observations. And I must say I love the idea of inaturalist and the community!
Here is my question :)
One thing I could not find an answer to is if it is ok to upload new photos of e.g., birds to old observations?
I now have photos of one of the birds I observed, that are much better than the one I used initially. Do I make a new upload or do I edit the old one ?
The way I do it:
If it is a better photo of the same time, then it goes to the original observation
If it is a better photo of the same species, even at the same spot, you better make a new observation
also keep in mind, when I first joined, I (personally) thought I should only upload the photos that were really good (for me). Then I thought ‘well, these are okay…’. Then I dug around for ‘kind of crappy but you can still tell what it is’ kind of photos. Even if you have an old observation of that bird with a not-so-good photo and a newer observation of that bird with a better photo (each observation is a moment in time), both photos add to the collection database. I now figure that my kind of crappy photos help the computer vision of iNat get better at identifying organisms.
An observation records an encounter with an individual organism at a particular time and location.
I’m not certain I know what you mean in your original post. Do you mean that you found extra photos that you took during the same encounter? In that case, you can edit them into the same observation. Do you mean that you encountered the same bird on a different occasion and took more photos of it? In that case, it should be a separate observation.