Reorder photos to start with most recent one?

[wbazant]

Right now a picture of a tree when planted is always the first one. Surely the newest one makes more sense?

[ezwelty]

Photos tend to be added, within a single review, in the order from wide view to detail view.

The photo returned for the location list thumbnail is the most recently uploaded photo for that location (see SQL, photo.id DESC). This seems fine because it is from the most recent review with photos, and likely to be a detail if multiple photos in that review, which is good because the thumbnail is very small.

For the location page, I actually can't find an explicit sorting of the reviews on the backend or frontend, which is odd and means that it is whatever the database returns (which is unspecified, but tends to be the creation order). Whatever order we display the photos in the carousel, I do think it should be the same as the reviews (?), otherwise the carousel, photo box, and review view won't match. If we order reviews in descending order (e.g. of the minimum of observation cate and creation date), then the first photo in the carousel would be the first photo of that review, which would tend to be the most recent wide view, yielding what you suggest.

[wbazant]

I wasn't sure what I think about this one, came to the conclusion that you're right about the order of photos matching the order of reviews, and also that the order of reviews shouldn't change. They're quite naturally read as logs or conversations. Instead we could select the representative photo as you describe (first photo of the last review) and use that in the thumbnail, as well as starting the carousel from it.