I like to id by updated at and latest, helps find observations left behind
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you have to be patient, some of my observations are identified in a day, some have been identified 2 years after their upload because it’s a not well known genus for example. every observation is useful for inaturalist. just not all are the same level of identification possible.
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I’d like to agree, but I’m struggling to see how a photo of someone’s lunch, or a power pole, or a toy ant, or even a landscape can really count as useful for iNat. And as for a photo of distant blurry green that is presumably a plant, possibly taken out of a car window? Don’t get me started. Lots of very useful observations do get ‘left behind’, but a few should never be uploaded in the first place.
(I hope you haven’t uploaded any of those? I haven’t looked! 
)
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Maybe every observation is useful to the observer but even then I’m doubtful. Not every wild organism we photo is useful to science or to the iNat database but at least those are consistent with what the site is made for.
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there should be a way to flag it as “non living thing” or “man made stuff” etc.
in cases where there are no organisms/evidence thereof in shot, the DQA item ‘evidence of organism’ can be downvoted
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Can be ID’d as “human” (that is, human artifacts can be considered evidence of the presence of humans, just as a nest or a track is evidence of the presence of other animals)
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I use the “human” ID for artifacts like fake flowers, sign posts, shoes, etc.
I use the DQA downvote for “evidence” for broader scenes like rooms full of stuff. But in the latter case I first check if the user is still active, and if they are, I leave a comment asking if there is something I’m not seeing, and suggest they give an explanation or a cropped photo of what they saw. I know I’m wasting my time, because they never respond, but I like to give the benefit of the doubt.
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Unlike for other species, there are “No Relevant Annotations” for observations identified as Human, so it can’t be annotated as a construction. Yes, it’s obvious to everyone that it is so, but I prefer the “No Evidence of organism” choice in these cases.
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But I assume those still stay under the given ID as Casual? Meaning that they’ll show up in searches if people include casual observations, and in photos ditto. I wouldn’t mind if it were a high-level ID, but I’d be reluctant to leave a species-level ID with such a DQA.
I don’t see why it matters whether there are annotations or not. If it has a community ID of human it will be automatically casual regardless of whether it is a photo of a person or a photo of a human construct. Annotations are meant to provide information relevant for data analysis (information about phenology etc), which presumably nobody is carrying out for such observations.
IDing human artifacts as human has the advantage that it changes the ID – it clearly signals that it is not the organism it was ID’d as. Since “casual” lumps all sorts of observations together, including both ones with missing information and ones that are not wild, and it is not obvious in most default searches why a particular observation is casual, it would seem to be beneficial to (for example) not leave fake flowers that may or may not be botanically accurate with an ID of “roses”.
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