Why does someone(s) keep on setting the taxon photo for Plants and Dicots to the same image?

I’d really love it to be disallowed for the same photo to be used for two different taxa (including different levels), but I can’t see that as likely to be implemented. But having Plants and Dicots having the same photo is deeply confusing to someone who apparently focuses at least as much on the image as the text… (And surely there are enough photos to choose from???)

(a) Am I the only one who cares?

(b) Is there any way to stop it happening? I tried to change it a ?few weeks? back, and it reverted. Someone else made a change a bit more recently and it also reverted. Do we have a choice between all out war and putting up with confusing photos?

I agree that having different photos for different taxonomic levels is good. I have no idea how to do it.

You can see who changed the images here: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/47124/history . Maybe you could reach out to the user who reverted your change and ask them about finding a consensus solution?

The help page for taxon photos says

If there are repeated changes, please flag the taxon and tag the users involved in the changes to have a discussion. Staff may lock a taxon’s photos in the event of an unresolved edit war.

So I’d suggest doing that as a first step, and then tagging in a curator or staff if you can’t reach an accord with the person/people making the changes (or they don’t respond). I’m with you that plants and dicots shouldn’t have the same taxon picture.

Thanks for the suggestions. I’ve started by sending a DM to the user in question (who I note has only changed the Dicots photo, twice; the Plants changes were other people). I’ll see whether I get a response and flag the taxon if not.

Why are such high level taxa with 10s of millions of observations have editable photos in the first place?

If a taxon has more than like 10 million observations, I think the photos should be locked where only curators and staff can change them.

To be honest, I was rather startled to find that I could when I first looked after getting frustrated by the photos being the same…

Probably those broad plant taxa photos should be locked with a useful display of variety. The weird and bizarre, but also the ordinary stuff which you might see. And if they are locked we don’t have to remember what was chosen this time.

There’s previous discussion about this here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/lock-taxon-photos-for-the-most-observed-taxa/50288

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/allow-curators-to-lock-editing-of-taxon-photos/68027