I wish it were possible to add annotations when adding the observations. As it is now, after adding an observation I have to open the observation back up and select values for the annotations then. Which is no problem for one observation, but when I add 20 observations at a time it’s a royal pain.
By ‘attributes’ do you mean Annotations? If so, then there is a forum topic for this already - https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/lets-talk-annotations/627/5 , and this feature has been requested there.
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sorry if i approved this one too fast, i’m a bit sleep deprived :) That being said the topic in the other thread isn’t a feature request so if this one gets clarified, we may want to leave it for people to vote on
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Oh, you’re quite right, Charlie. Yes, let’s wait for clarification.
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My mistake - yes, I do mean ‘Annotations’ (no wonder my search under Feature Requests came up empty!) Do you still want to keep this? If so I’ll go back and edit my initial post for clarity.
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I agree, it would also be really good to encourage the use of annotations as I usually only see them on about 5% of observations.
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You can create observation fields at the time you are creating an observation. I believe every annotation has 1 or more observation fields that are automatically linked into it, so that creating the observation field automatically populates the annotation.
For example if doing insects if you populate the observation field called Insect Life Stage - that will automatically propagate into the Life Stage annotation. If you populate the observation field called sex, that propagates automatically into the Sex annotation.
For plants the observation field Flowering Phenology automatically populates the Phenology annotation. The Observation field Sex does the same here.
For birds (and I assume other families) the observation field Life Stage populates the Life Stage annotation
A little experimenting should hopefully find any others you need. You just need to watch that there are often many different just slightly differently named observation fields, and you need to find the right one.
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@cmcheatle wrote: “You just need to watch that there are often many different just slightly differently named observation fields, and you need to find the right one.”
That’s the issue. If you try to choose the Annotation “Life Stage”, there are nearly two pages of them listed–so which is the correct one at one moment? That’s asking too much during the bulk uploading process to sift through all those. For example, @jacobgorneau has been properly encouraging folks to annotate their observations for National Moth Week, but in the absence of a convenient way to accomplish this at the time of a bulk upload OR in bulk after upload, then the use of Annotations is going to remain poorly used.
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for whatever reason the inat devs don’t want to standardize fields but that being the case it would be nice to be able to ‘favorite’ fields or something to at least be internally consistent. At one time someone had a journal entry or something that linked to the ‘best’ or most used of each field type but… i don’t remember where it is.
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I dont think there is an ‘at the moment’ component to it, unless the devs are actively changing which ones are linked together. Is it annoying to figure out which one(s) are linked maybe, but once you figure it out, at least you can do what the request covers which is bulk add.
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Perhaps the annotations that are used by iNat for the taxon pages/phenology graphs/etc can have a different label that makes them stand out when people are searching for them? Or add a little iNat icon to those being used in the taxon page graphs? That might help a little. But I agree that having a more formal way to add this info during obs creation would be nice.
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If this (adding annotations while uploading observations) is made reality at some point, it would be nice to see them used to improve computer vision suggestions. E.g. I could envision having a picture of a flowering plant and computer vision suggesting not only species that are similar and/or found nearby but also flowering at the same time of year. It may be too early to make a feature request yet for that, since it would depend on adding the ability to annotate before upload first.
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Even cooler would using computer vision systems to recognize that it is flowering (or budding, fruiting, etc) based on the image, and modify suggestions with regards to regional phenology without requiring manual input of an annotation first. (See related feature request and staff response).
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Good afternoon. I have more than 5000 observations. I like order and try to add attribute’s values for everyone. Now the values of the observation attributes have to be added by opening each observation separately, which takes a lot of time and traffic.
I would like to be able to add the values of the observation attributes (such as Proof of Presence, Alive or Dead, Stage of Life, Plant Phenology, and others) on the observation upload page. This feature has already been implemented for adding tags and projects when uploading, it is very convenient.
I will be grateful for the implementation of such a convenience.
PS I apologize for my poor English with an automatic translator.
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I was just about to create my own topic to request this, but this one already exists, so I’ll just copy and paste what I was going to have in mine here! (Hopefully that’s okay, I don’t want to be rude or anything! This issue has just been bugging me for a while now so I wanted to explain why we need it!)
This is my first time creating a topic on the forum, so please let me know if I’m doing anything wrong!
Platforms: Desktop site and mobile app
Description of need: Annotations are important for the overal quality of information on iNaturalist, and I’ve made it my mission to add annotations to all of the observations I post, however, that is not as easy as it sounds, even when I know which annotations I should be adding.
Adding annotations on the mobile app (for Android, at least) is very slow, and sometimes won’t load at all. Trying to do it on the site requires jumping around either opening dozens of tabs and going through one at a time, or trying to use the (often very confusing) Identify tool to try and sort it to show my own observations.
It is neither easy to accomplish, or quick, or easy.
Annotations not only help the people doing research on the species in question, if people are trying to avoid seeing observations of dead animals, their only recourse as of November 11th 2021 is to use the Identify tool and set it to only display observations that have been annotated as alive.
But with probably 99% of observations not being annotated at all, trying to find annotations that are marked alive isn’t nearly as helpful as you’d think it is.
The solution to that problem is to get more people to add annotations, but the way annotations are right now makes that not only confusing, but difficult.
Feature request details:
I would like to see the option for adding annotations added directly to the “Upload Observation” page, added on with the other basic information like location/date, and notes. This would allow everyone the option to quickly and easy annotate their observations while they’re adding the rest of the information, without having to go back later and slowly add them in one at a time for each observation.
It would also be immesely helpful if iNaturalist could include a tutorial on annotations, explaining what they’re used for, why they’re important, and what each different annotation means. A simple info box next to the annotation spot when uploading would suffice with a quick explanation, like “if you are observing an animal, is it alive or dead?” “if you are observing a plant, are there any open flowers? Are there fruits? Just flower buds?” “Is this an adult animal, or a juvenile?” Ect.
I’ve created a fake screenshot here that helps to illustrate what it would hopefully look like
fake screeenshot1691×802 136 KB
This would put the ability to annotate things right in front of the users, where they are guarenteed to see them, and therefore much more likley to use them.
You could also have the most basic “dead or alive” available as recommended, and then the rest below a dropdown menu so they aren’t taking up space.
fake screeenshot2691×691 129 KB
Adding the ability to add annotations at the same time as you are uploading the observation would make adding annotations quicker and easier, since if it’s right in front of you, you won’t forget to add them in later, it will make more people realize that it’s an option, and would hopefully get more people to add them, which would help not only with people who need information on the species, but would help people filter the results in the future!
I definitely think that people should be encouraged to at least annotate the observation as “dead or alive” when it’s applicable, because that at least is an easy one to answer for the person making the observation, and would get people into the habit of annotating when they can!
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I would also like to add that more detailed tutorials and explanations would be very helpful for what the different annotations mean, especially with regards to plants. One common source of argument is that there is no annotation for a plant that has perfect flowers, aka it can produce both pollen and fruit. I annotate them as female, because they can produce fruit which I assume is helpful information for researchers looking to collect seeds, but others argue that they shouldn’t be classed as either, since they can do both. But since iNaturalist doesn’t give us the option to mark a plant as a hermaphrodite/perfect flowers, that’s not really an option.
I think I read somewhere that new annotation statuses won’t be added anytime soon, so I would at least like a better explanation for what the site considers classifies a plant as “female” and what classifys it as “male”.
I’ve been assuming that regardless of other abilities, if it is capable of producing fruit, it is classified as female, but I don’t actually know for sure, because when you hover over the male and female annotations, no further information is given.
A lot of people are intimidated by annotations because they aren’t sure what they mean, and since annotations are just “first come first serve” sort of thing where no one else can correct it except to downvote it, they don’t want to make the wrong one. Making annotations more easily accesible is a start but we also need to make them easier to understand.
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I usually interpret the sex annotation as only applying to dioecious plant species that have separate male and female individuals. This means that the annotation is really only applicable to a few plant species. For a plant with fruits/seeds, I would just mark them as fruiting under phenology. That is more likely to be searched than female to find out when a species is producing seeds. There’s also more discussion about annotations in this long thread: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/lets-talk-annotations/
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Please don’t annotate plants as female when it’s not the case for the species, it can get misleading and would result in graphs showing strange information, @tiwane already asked in one of topics about groups of plants that have sexes separately, but it seems changes of it weren’t implemented.
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Yes!!!..This…Please add this feature.
This has been requested since 2019 and @nonbinary-naturalist nonbinary-naturalist has shown a very nice example. This would not be hard to code into the upload page.
reposting the suggestion
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There has been some work on this, and it’s more complicated than one might think. For example, what if you upload a photo of a bee on a flower, call it a plant and annotate it as flowering. Then you decide you actually meant this to be the bee observation so you change the taxon to bees. What should the system do with this now-invalid annotation?
Certainly there are ways to address the various issues, but iNat doesn’t have many developers and they have a lot of tasks to cover.
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