One of the biggest features I’ve been hoping for in the upcoming app is the ability to save observations for offline reference. I’ve primarily wanted it for my own observations, but being able to save others would be valuable too.
When doing field work, there have been many times I’ve wished I could quickly search previous observations of mine within a given region to verify IDs, however this is obviously not possible at the moment without cell service.
No idea how complicated it would be to introduce this feature, but it would be incredibly valuable!
by downloading observations, i assume you mean primarily downloading images.
currently, you have 5000+ observations. suppose that each observation has 1 image each @ 3MB. so you’d have to download ~15GB worth of images.
then on top of that, you don’t have a map offline, and i’m thinking it’s probably unlikely iNat would ever add functionality to allow you to download maps.
so is that still a feature you would want?
in my mind, you could just print out your observations in an electronic format, and then just that electronic file. (this is something you can do now in various ways outside of the app.)
Yep, I was imagining using the polygon or circle tool, similar to the current search function, to download content within an area. I would be more than happy to download a couple GB for a trip, but you’re right, more than 10 or so would be pretty unrealistic.
I had not considered that maps would have to be downloaded as well. But a simple hillshade at low resolution can be only a few hundred MB, so that seems manageable! But I can imagine that downloading maps within the app may be quite the feature to add.