Use stock photo derived from target species rather than broader general stock photo for Interaction->Visited flower of:

[kcthetc1]

Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: all

URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant: example - butterfly species observed on American Trumpet Vine - https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=47224&verifiable=any&view=species&field:Interaction- >Visited%20flower%20of=75995

Description of need:
Rather than showing the general stock photo for that particular species observed as interacting with whatever photo, it would be cool and in some ways useful to show stock photo examples of each butterfly actually interacting with the target flower species.

Feature request details:
Rather than showing this for Eastern Tiger Swallowtail as the stock photo when searching for species interacting with American Trumpet Vine: https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/147896974 , instead show this (as an example) as the stock photo to represent this butterfly species when searching through flowers interacted on = American Trumpet Vine : https://inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/679600629/large.jpg Sounds like a lot of work to me, but doesn’t hurt to bring it up.

[chase-prairie]

For some reason, the forum is breaking your link, so you might need to direct html code it

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=47224&verifiable=any&field:Interaction-%3EVisited%20flower%20of=75995

For clarity, do you mean the species icons here?

Which would like this? (Forgive the sloppy photoshop)

It would be very nice! But I suspect would be a major pain to code out. It would have to somehow search for photos for any given Observation Field so that more than just Interaction->Visited Flower Of has this experience.

Personally, I can see the argument that this level of work is worth doing when we have an internal confirmation ID system for flower visitation. As of right now, it’s a free-for-all and I know that bugs some people who would prefer linked observations instead (not that it stops me!). Also Observation Fields are so fluid at any given moment, it might be a lot of work for something that could get flipped at any time.

Still love the idea though, it would be such a cool page to browse. People are always so surprised and delighted how quickly you can bring up all these great interaction photos if you just know the right obscure URL! I love anything that makes these valuable OFs more visible to more people.

[lnlcflx]

Thanks @chase-prairie for linking to my rant comment and raising my attention, because I think I coincidentally have a working solution to OP’s feature request.

First, I agree that this request is probably out of scope for iNat and would make only sense as part of a more sophisticated new Interactions system.

However, I like the idea and I actually implemented a feature in my iNat Browser extension recently, which can emulate this functionality right now. Here’s a screenshot from your link:

When enabled, my extension will replace the pictures in the species tab by one of the observations that are actually included in the current search.
So if you filter by the Visited flower of field, it only shows pictures with this field.

It picks the first matching observation but respects what you order by, i.e. if you sort by faves, it will use the observations with most favorites as the species picture.

Note that by default this feature is only enabled when looking at a user’s species tab, but there is a toggle in the extension settings to enable it globally in the explore page (by unchecking the box), like so:

A problem is ofc that these pictures are not curated, as you can see. So it might happen to be choose blurry pictures and such for the species tab.

[chase-prairie]

This is so cool!!! Well done!