As I understand it:
- There is no rejection of large habitat images.
- Yes, the CV can learn to associate habitat with a species. It already does this in many cases. I see lots of photos of vegetation IDed by CV as anoles, and, they do indeed look like spots that an anole would love to hang out but…there’s not one there.
So yes, the CV does not search through images to “find” the organism. However, including uncropped pics isn’t against the rules, and habitat information could be useful. I don’t think keeping the date/time stamp in the photo is a particularly good reason not to crop the photo myself (should be in the EXIF and will be in the iNat observation). I also think cropping is generally good practice as it definitely helps human IDers. Someone could always upload a full version of the photo and a cropped version (I don’t think this is bad practice, but if there’s guidance that suggests otherwise, happy to learn).