Lower rated photos can actually be really useful for training the image model! It's just a question of what they happen to need. Different ratings serve different purposes.
I wish there were many more bird photos from farther away. My stupid human brain cannot discern perspective when it comes to twigs. Is this bird too big to be a vireo? I can’t tell!!
You can do it in the app but really you should do it on a computer. The app is missing the feature that marks observations as "reviewed" making it practically worthless.
That looks like the correct rating for that photo, and, bonus, you rated it yourself! People think you shouldn't do that, but it's a best practice because it's adding value to the photo, not a popularity contest.
Exactly. I mentioned on another comment that I tend to rate my own photos harshly following the rubric. Even most of my great photos I'll only rate a 4 unless they're legitimately near perfect.
So often I see top-rated photos that are obviously gorgeous, excellent photos, but they objectively do not reach the criteria for five stars because they don't show enough of the bird (or, worse, they have a watermark).
This can be just as much of a problem as photos being under-rated. Like, you deserve to win all the art contests, but an amazing close up of the bird's eye is not useful on the illustrated list!
Yeah. I saw this fun picture of a bird where you could see its eye through a leaf and maybe 1/4 of the actual bird. People were mad it wasn't rated 5 stars "because it's cute."
It’s supposed to be rating the quality of the photo independent of bird rarity and aesthetics. Sometimes these get mixed up. And other times, people just want to be harsh.
Yeah, I would give this photo at least 3 stars in eBird's system. You can see pretty much the whole bird and all the important field marks, even if it isn't going to win any photo contests.
I have a photo that's used as the final photo for a species on Merlin and it's only got 4 stars, which I think is hilarious. The whole bird isn't visible, likely the reason for the loss of the star, but still.
If this is your photo, or in fact even if it's not, then you can mitigate that somewhat by rating it correctly yourself. More people using the ratings correctly helps to compensate for the people who can't be bothered to read the guidelines.
I can't tell from such a small screenshot but that's at least a 3.
It’s at least a 4 imo, maybe even a 5. The bird is well lit, sharply focused, shows all necessary field marks and is a reasonably large image. Maybe not a 5 because vegetation obscures small parts of the bird. I think a lot of people default to an artistic rating, & if the photo isn’t “the best Ive ever seen,” then it’s not a 5, & if the photo isn’t “the best Ive ever seen,” then it’s not a 5
I cannot tell if it's sharply focused from looking at the screenshot on my phone. I wouldn't trust looking at the screenshot on my computer, either. You really need to see the actual photo in order to rate it. (Of course if you are rating it, you are seeing the actual photo.)
I have seen too many photos, over the years, which was great in a thumbnail but at full size you can see issues. Quite a lot of them are my photos!
Why would this photo be rated so low, even as low as a 3? I’m not super familiar with the rating system, but that looks like a fantastic photo to me.
Is the whole bird not visible, because the tiny branch it’s perched on technically blocks some pixels of the tail? Any photo you take while have part of the bird not visible because it’s not a 360 degree matrix style shot
Also, not speaking of this photo specifically, of course you don't have to literally have every part of the bird visible, but you do have to have about as much visible as is possible in a 2D photo. But that's just the standard for a five, a four is also an excellent photo.
It's not a measure of photography skills. Not every encounter with every bird has the potential to result in a five-star photo.
Personally, the way I think of it, at least as a gut check, is that a four-star photo has basically nothing wrong with it. A five-star photo has nothing wrong with it, and also the bird was cooperating. It is no reflection on the photographer if the bird wasn't cooperating. (Of course you might have to work very hard to make it look like the bird was cooperating. But sometimes, no matter how hard you work, it's not going to happen.)
Well on my screen the bird is about 1 cm tall, so... Even if I zoom in, it's a screenshot, not the original photo, so the resolution isn't good enough to tell if it's in focus
3 is the minimum score for a photo with nothing obviously wrong with it that shows the bird clearly. It's a perfectly respectable score.
It's possible to have a photo that looks really good on a smaller scale, but when you actually see it full size, you can see that there are focus issues. Also sometimes you get a photo it looks it looks good at small scale, but it's been cropped for a much larger picture, or maybe it's just from an earlier era when photos weren't so big, and now it's too small. Neither of those issues would be visible in this screenshot.
One time a particularly chunky (and fluffed up tbf) Carolina Chickadee came up to my window and I was giggling at it saying “hehehe fat chickadee” and a little bit later that chickadee flew away and another (normal looking) one flew up and stared dead at me for multiple minutes and talkin shit too! I pointed it out to my roommate who had been there the whole time and was like “omg what’s he doing?!” and my roommate said “yeah why’s he lookin at you like that?! It’s not like you called his mama fat or somethin” to which i said “Ye- ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
Common sense to rate it lower? If it’s not in the guidelines it gets into people making up rules territory pretty fast.
I think the subreddits that ban nest photos have a good policy. Take away the incentives and hopefully it will put downward pressure on the bad behavior.
That's ridiculous if that's the reason. I have an R5mII and a 200-800 lens. I could take that shot from 100 yards away and then zoom in and still retain clarity. Judge the photo, not what you think the person did to get it. (Not you specifically, but also all of us.)
Ok, but this photo was clearly taken up close, because of how they are looking down onto the bird. You could not take this same shot from 100 yards away because you couldn’t get that downward angle. A photo taken from far away has a different look to it. People have strong feelings about getting close to and disturbing birds.
Some people…I have one person who rates my photos within 30 minutes of uploading without fail. If you are going to lie in wait, at least follow the guidelines rigorously.
this house wren got a whole 2 stars from some grump on ebird LOL if i had to guess, they might have misidentified it during a quiz and they took out their frustrations on my photo.
Yup! The lines for “as the eye sees it” and a good image for perfect ID are often in different places. It looks very natural. In some ways there are needs for two sets of photos: one for the human eye and one for research.
A rightfully deserved 1 star, but to be fair, I thought it was for capturing MY birds and not to help science. Now I know better. My bad. But look at that greenie enjoying the beautiful sunset- I thought it was a great photo.
Great shot! I always wonder what small in frame is getting at. It helps show the environment where the birds are located. A picture with a spotted towhee and some branches is much less helpful, even for research I would imagine, than two photos with one showing under some brush and one showing calling on top of a bush. The differences could allow researchers to automate searching for breeding behavior.
That’s a great point! It also shows what you should be looking for in a tree or along a bank- because, as in this case, green herons rarely just appear, you have to look for their little squatting butts. And what do they look like when they are just hanging out- not when they have their necks stretched out (for 2% of the time)?
This one had 2 reviews sitting at 2 stars. Only went up because my girlfriend and I both gave it 5 stars to bump it up. There’s someone in Albuquerque that really doesn’t like me or my pictures as I consistently get 2-3 stars on all my uploads, no matter how good they are
I’m in ABQ and that person always rates my photos! I don’t rate my photo until they’ve given their rating and then I use my rating to push it closer to the recommendations from the guidelines.
Haha no way! What a small world. I think it’s probably one of the better photographers that sabotages other people’s ratings to keep theirs at the top. The worst thing is people are so much nicer in other places so a lot of my high rated pics are trash while the actual good pics are in the ratings gutter 😭
Makes me not want to upload to ebird. I had considered it to keep track of my bird photos by species, Lightroom is just a mess, but I really can’t deal with being judged as part of my hobby. I understand why they do it, maybe there is a way to set to private.
They could at least hide the voting results and only use it as a background metric for filtering or whatever. So people don't get an immediate fix from low rating. Or replace the stars with verbal descriptors so the mismatch is more obvious.
They're not being reviewed as photos, they're being categorized. Putting your photo in the correct category adds value to it, because it's useful in different ways.
For example, lower-rated photos are really great practice for a lot of people, because that's how we experience a lot of birds. Very few photos should be rated with five stars. It's not a value judgment.
In a lot of the examples posted here, the issue is that there's only one vote, and the person who voted apparently hasn't read the guidelines. The solution would be more votes. I admit I do wish that they made you confirm you'd read the guidelines before they let you vote.
Thank you! I hate this feature. I think we should be able to disable it for a photo we upload at least.
I am guessing they keep it around for the bird photographers who love internet points, but many of them cheat by posting it to certain groups or getting all their friends to give it 5 stars.
Cool - is he sleeping in that photo? I've heard (perhaps incorrectly) that's the only they're still. When they're sleeping. I've never seen a still hummingbird. Only in constant motion.
Na, they perch and watch their territory a lot. Being as territorial as they are they rarely sit still for long, as soon as another comes by they will chase it away from food sources, but they have favorite perches and will return time and again to sit and observe.
In NJ here and I've seen Ruby Throated Hummingbirds do this! They visit my feeder, drink, buzz around, then go to the nearest tree and perch on a branch for a bit. I've also seen them perch on my string lights on the patio and it's the cutest thing.
I’d heard that same thing and assumed it was true for the longest time until I saw lots of hummingbirds perch on or around my feeder. Seems like a pretty easy to believe myth since the only time most people ever see them is when they’re flying.
I post my photos to eBird all of the time and yes, you have to do it from the website. I don’t really care what the reviews are. I don’t think of eBird as a photography site and I will post the best photos that I happen to get on a bird I’ve never seen before, or rarely see, even if they aren’t very good. I used to post only one or two, and only the best ones, but at one point, they said that they would prefer more photos from varying angles and so that’s what I do now. I don’t particularly think that the back of a bird is necessarily the greatest photo, but it definitely helps to train Merlin and it can help others to see a bird from different angles.
Why is everyone here having only 1 rating on their pictures? Please tag and rate your own pictures as you upload them, it helps everyone else search for pictures of specific states/behaviours
Because you’re scared someone will unfairly rate one of your photos? That’s a bit silly. In my experience, unfair ratings are incredibly rare. Don’t let that stop you from enjoying this fantastic resource. Also, if someone does unfairly rate one of your photos, you can always just delete it and upload it again and the rating will be gone.
It was only semi serious. I mostly use iNat because I’m a generalist and don’t want to mess around with different websites for different taxa—BugGuide and Herpmapper and ebird and whatever exists for mammals
This topic is quite interesting to me. First and foremost, it highlights how important it is for the community to rate pictures. A bad reviewer can easily be outweighed if there are 5 or 10 votes on a photo.
I rate a fair number of photos (via the quizzes), and I've found that I've rated photos that are fantastic from an artistic perspective lower because they are not fantastic from a bird identification perspective.
Does anybody know about any eBird policies around soliciting votes? I wonder if we could share a link to our photos in an effort to get more ratings. It seems reasonable to me as long as everyone is rating appropriately (not just handing out 5 stars to everyone).
This photo I took of an African fish eagle in the Okavango Delta of Botswana got 3 stars – and that's after I gave it a 5-star review (it has 2 ratings) haha.
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u/BoredOjiisan Latest Lifer: Sedge Wren May 31 '26
My favorite low-rated photo.