Duplicate images
Hi, I just found this database while working on a visual search tool for plants. I started downloading a subset of your images and noticed that there are a lot of duplicates of one specific image for many plants. Specifically this image shows up on roughly 20-30% of the plant records I downloaded.
The image shows up under different URLs but the individual URLs show up on multiple different species. For example:
http://inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/100001822/medium.jpeg
http://inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/100001842/medium.jpeg
I was wondering if this is a known issue or even intentional?
Hi @flaviogortana , I looked into this while auditing the metadata, in case it helps.
The two URLs you gave are different photos. 100001842 is a separate oak specimen photographed on the same grid background, so they look nearly identical at a glance. The image you attached is 100001822 itself. Each photo_id appears only once in BioTrove. Both rows have genus Quercus but a blank scientificName, even though taxonRank says "species". That may be why they seemed to land on the wrong species in your download.
That turns out to be fairly common: 153,134 rows in BioTrove have a blank scientificName with taxonRank = species (Senega, Condaliopsis and Myliobatis are the most common genera). BioTrove-Train has none, so it looks like those rows were filtered out there. I couldn't reproduce one image showing up on 20-30% of plant records, but I only checked metadata, not image contents.
I did find a related issue: about 124K photo_ids are listed under two or more different species. I've raised that, together with a benchmark question, in discussion #2.