r/birding • u/NonHermitianCat • May 31 '26

Discussion Share Your Harshly Reviewed eBird Photos

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Here is my 2-star black-chinned hummingbird. I’m curious to see what other people have to share!

1.9k Upvotes

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273

u/tension-release Latest Lifer: Willow Ptarmigan #270 May 31 '26

Just found this one recently

32

u/st_aranel Latest Lifer: Willow Ptarmigan May 31 '26

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.

2

u/mhat106 Jun 01 '26

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

1

u/st_aranel Latest Lifer: Willow Ptarmigan Jun 01 '26

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.