Using photos taken of image from another screen

General
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Hi,

I’ve searched for similar posts, but did not get any hits…

I’ve come across an increasing number of profiles where the uploaded images are from a photo taken by a phone of the image on a computer screen. The resulting images are of poor and pixelated quality, often with app menu items included, and naturally lacking any EXIF of the organism in the photo. For instance I’ve come across observations claiming to be from Canaima in Venezuela, with EXIF from a city in Germany.

Several of these observation are RG, which is problematic.

The observations with photos taken of images in books and calendars are clearly copyright infringements, so flagged accordingly. But I wonder if some people are struggling with uploading or transferring between devices, or can’t be bothered and just upload to their computer and then use the iNat app to upload.

What is the proper way to communicate/deal with these observations/profiles?

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In general, I think this is considered acceptable, as long as the photo seems to be theirs and they have manually updated the location/time data to be correct. If the photo is from a trip and the location data seems to be their house, I’ll leave a note asking them to make sure to correct the location. If the date or location is obviously wrong and they don’t correct it, you can always mark the observation as having an incorrect time/location and I think that shifts it to casual.

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I’ve done this before when I want to upload a photo from my camera but don’t have access to a computer with a USB port.
Mycteria americana (Wood Stork) from downtown disney florida on December 31, 2023 by Robert Levy · iNaturalist for example.
If the location was my house on May 28 when I took the photos, then you would mark Location/date incorrect under the DQA.
If you suspect the photo is not theirs, you can ask politely “Is this your photo?”(don’t accuse of copyright infringement unless there is proof).

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People do this, mostly because of problems with the technology, I think. If they’ve gotten the date and location wrong or violated copyright, mark that off, but otherwise it’s OK though not optimal.

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I just added a back-of-camera photo using my cell phone because I wanted it as a temporary placeholder for a location. I added a note to that effect. When I get back home I’ll upload one or more pics from my main camera after I have access to a computer and delete the placeholder pic.

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This is an allowable practice, but as an identifier I’ve noticed a high percentage of photos like this are misplotted. If the background doesn’t match the location, or the location is inside a house and the species is not normally found in residential areas, I’ll mark it as inaccurate location and leave a note asking them to check the location. 90% of the time I never get a response, which is why I mark the location as inaccurate first, because I’m almost never going to get further clarification.

It also seem particularly common with students required to use iNat for class, in which case I often check to see if there’s an identical photo taken by someone else, and if so explain to them that using other peoples photos is not allowed.

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Many thanks for the input so far.

I’ve tried to wrap my head around the reasons, as the profiles I’ve come across know how to use the desktop app, as a many of their observations are uploaded from desktop. If so, then why upload images to desktop, then display the image there and photograph it with phone instead of uploading it directly? Especially when, in this case, there are just two observations from Venezuela - a rather long journey for just two observations.

I too don’t get a response, so I still don’t understand the reasoning, and thus I will focus on observations that are obvious.

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Thank you for starting this thread. My experience is similar. It’s hard to know to how widespread or problematic it is, but I see observations where people take pictures of their trips to the ocean or mountains, potentially out of cell range, and then post observations from a location at town, taking pictures of the back of their camera or their computer screen, or a screenshot of their photo roll. These observations can linger for years without comment or being marked as “location incorrect.” In general, I think observers and identifiers are more complacent about location accuracy than taxonomic accuracy.

Agreed that this seems like the sensible thing to do. I worry about the non-obvious ones that are introducing bad location data to iNat and shared data partners, but we don’t have a great tool to review and flag them yet.

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I have a local photographer in my area who does this because they don’t want to upload their “actual” photo to the internet for fear of it being stolen, but they want to use iNat to get IDs for the pictures. So they crop and touch up the photo on the desktop, take a phone photo of it to upload to get a name, and then keep the high quality image on their desktop to make prints of and sell. Just another thought process that may lead to this.

When I’ve done it, it’s usually been back-of-camera photos to save the location where I took the picture until I can get home and pull the proper photo off of the SD card. I’m sure I’ve done this and forgotten about it at some point, so I bet I have some back-of-camera shots still up somewhere.

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Must admit I just ignore any “obviously taken off a screen” pictures because it’s a step too far to be expected to check or query if they’re actually logged at the correct location.

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While I admire your diligence in trying to determine genuine RG observations, I would offer @DianaStuder’s frequent advice as an option: “Mark as reviewed, and move on”

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The journey may have been taken for other reasons and the two obervations are incidental.

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I don’t know if this is ever what you’re seeing, but I’ll occasionally take a picture of my camera screen because I’m impatient to try to figure out an ID and don’t have access to my computer to upload the pictures.

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I don’t see anything wrong with BoC shots as long as it’s their own photo, correct date and time, and not so horribly blurry as to be un-identifiable.

I upload plenty of pictures after transferring to my computer or directly from my phone that are grainy or pixelated, no back-of-camera photo needed. I just suck as a photographer!

I don’t think menus or camera showing up is any more of a problem logistically than, for example, uncropped photos where the organism is a tiny part of the scene and there is a lot of stuff around it. Aesthetically, it’s not the greatest, but iNaturalist’s purpose isn’t to be an art gallery. I’d be in trouble if it was.

Copyright violations that are not BoC shots are common – photos of posters or books, stolen photos off the internet, etc. I think it’s just as easy to click download on someone else’s photo than to whip out a phone and take a picture of the computer screen.

I don’t think that BoC photos are more likely to be incorrect in terms of date and time, to be honest. I have found many inaccurate location (or date) photos that are not BoC shots.

Many cameras don’t have GPS, and phone-linked tracking apps, if they work at all, can be battery-draining and inaccurate. That means many people are relying on memory after they’ve come home, and taken the time to transfer their photos to the computer, edit them, etc.

Most IDers can’t check all observations they ID for location accuracy, I’m sure. If it stands out as an out-of-place species (or subspecies) or with a habitat that obviously doesn’t match the claimed location, I’ll notice. Without those obvious clues, for many observations’ locations we just have no way of knowing whether they are accurate or not. Sometimes it takes me quite a bit of sleuthing to verify that a location or date is inaccurate, with identifying plants in the background, checking the weather history for the location and date in question, using Street View on Google Maps to scope the location for the photo background, etc. There are some observations that I am pretty sure are incorrect, despite the observer’s claims that they are, but I just don’t have enough information to mark the location as inaccurate.

Though I haven’t uploaded them, like @paul_dennehy I actually use BoC photos to record accurate locations of photos I’ve taken with my camera, since it doesn’t have GPS. This means that my BoC photos would be more likely to have an accurate location. Also I often have to set my camera’s date/time manually when I travel, while my phone updates automatically. I have forgotten to do so before. I sometimes upload these with my photos just to grab the location data so I don’t have to copy the latitude and longitude manually, then delete the BoC shot before I push “Submit”. Some day, I will forget to hit delete, I’m sure.

I think there a lot of reasons to upload BoC photos, many mentioned here.

Excitement is probably the reason I can imagine I might do so some day. If I see a really really cool organism and just really want to upload it right now and not in a few days when I can get to my computer and do it properly, I might have to. Or if I see something I don’t recognize and really want to get an ID as soon as possible.

Or like when I was on a trip overseas recently and spilled an entire mug of tea on my laptop. You can bet that during the period that I thought it would be a long, long time before I had a computer again, I was trying to decide whether extremely low resolution photos transferred to my phone from my camera via Bluetooth or BoC shots were a better option for getting my photos onto iNat.

Luckily for everyone who has to be subjected to my observations, my computer dried out enough that it started working again about 24 hours later.

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I don’t mind BOC shots so much (and it could be a placeholder to get GPS logged at the right location as a lot of cameras don’t have GPS), and I can see there may be a need/want to get something IDed before you leave site (for example to see if it’s worth refinding).

What I ignore are ones taken as phone shots from computer screens or screenshots of phone camera rolls because there’s a very good chance they’re not actually logged at the location the submitted photo was taken, or belong to the submitter at all.

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I’ve done this a couple times and it boils down to the fact that it’s one step easier and it’s a species you can identify from a BoC photo. For example, I have a Common Yellowthroat pic on my cell phone that I took of the back display of my real camera.

I plan to upload that photo from my cell phone as it’s obviously a Common Yellowthroat. This is easier than fishing out my computer that has a card reader, putting the card reader in said computer, then uploading the real photo.

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