As I find in the community guidelines: Duplicate observations. They’re not ideal, but they’re usually due to oversight or bugs. Politely ask people to remove them but if they don’t, it’s not a big deal unless it becomes a habit. Keep in mind that observations of the same individual by different p…

I suspect at least some of the aversion against duplicates is coming from a mindset of wanting “clean” data for e.g. abundance of a species in a particular location. However, that’s not what iNat is intended to be used for and its data is not suitable for that kind of analysis. But I understand that…

I prefer not to be upset by minor things like duplicate observations. I just pass them by. I like to save my annoyance for serious issues, like the people who think one space (not two) is appropriate between sentences. Or who think “may have” rather than “might have” is the past tense conditional…

[image] Italopithecus: ok, but it is not fault of those who flag duplicates. No, nothing is ever the fault of those who do it. The congestion on the roads is not the fault of those who drive cars, either.

Eh eh… I do not remember, it must have been long time ago. Could you remind the post via pm here or in iNat?

marina_gorbunovaorbunova-Yolkina: Or just add a vote in DQA as was proposed multiple times throughout years. I think the problem (and why this keeps popping up over and over again) is that there is no dedicated DQA vote for “duplicate” yet. Therefore, people use inconsistent workarounds that…

It’s all good. I still wonder why your celery, is blue? Now you are on my list as Phelipanche person, nana or ramosa - thank you.

It’s pretty easy, choose one with the best photo and mark the rest, if there’s only one photo in those duplicates then of course save the first one, user can and if they wish will remark what they want and save the observation they wish, but they always can reoder photos too. If you see the observat…

I figure it is problematic when multiple users upload observations using the same photo, not a similar photo or a photo of the same individual from a different angle, but the exact same photo (5-10 times). It seems to be an issue with school groups. I suspect that people are sharing the same photos …

It can be annoying, but via iNat rules it’s ok and it’s very normal, e.g. rare bird can be photographed by thousands, if at least some of them are on iNat, that’s a lot of photos, but every person has the right to upload what they saw, sometimes only one gets to photograph it, but yes, with school g…

I stopped worrying about duplicates at some point (actually, after reading a similar thread here on the forums and some comments of people that did not really care and explained why) and just ID them or leave it be if I don´t feel like IDing them. I don´t think it is a big difference for the dataset…

When I first began, I had little idea about what I was “supposed to be doing”. It’s cryptic out in iNat-landia. No surprise, it wasn’t long before I got the “Those are duplicate photos”. And my reaction (to myself) was “yes, of course they are. So what? Isn’t that the point?”. Apparently not. But I…

Why do some people get bent-out-of-shape about duplicates?

General

bouteloua October 11, 2022, 12:35pm 65

There’s an open feature request for this here - https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/duplicate-prevention-notify-observers-if-their-image-checksums-match-others-on-the-site/258

Topic		Replies	Views
Create a way to flag duplicate observations and remove RG status from the extras Feature Requests	51	7484	July 11, 2019
How to deal with a user with numerous duplicate observations? General question	48	1454	September 4, 2025
How can you treat multiple observations that depict the same individual? General	30	1359	July 30, 2024
What is the appropriate response/action for a user uploading multiple duplicate images, organisms? General question	22	3503	November 22, 2020
Tiny Little Questions General question	50	2894	October 12, 2023

Why do some people get bent-out-of-shape about duplicates?

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