Add Compare button to Identify and mobile app

Feature Requests
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1

Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: (especially) mobile, but not limited to

URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant: identify

Description of need: So apparently the compare button that exists in Explore (web) is not available in identify and mobile. As I learnt recently, this is intentional, but for me this seems to be a bug not a feaure.

When I identify for others, in the very most cases, the other persons ID is already right. So the agree button is a fast way to get my 50 cent of experience to the comunity. BUT a lot of times I need to cross check this before I can agree, because I know there are particular differences you need to look at for confirmation. Also, most of the times I just need a quick memory refreshment of some particular things of the being to look at, e.g. different throat patterns in similar species but forgot which belongs to which. So I know how to distinguish the species, but can not remember all the features of all the species. So it would be way more resource efficient and faster to just let me compare the suggested ID of the other person with the observation photos instead of going to the whole list of suggestions from AI, which can in some cases be messy or just not including the actual species the user person has suggested. Which then requires additional manual input from my side, which the other person has already done.

I hope that the inference server is not always triggered every time I open the suggestion tab or click the add ID button on mobile, but would explain why the list of IDs is loading so much slower than the rest of the content. In this case, this change could save countless server hours.

Feature request details:
So my suggestion would be to add a quick compare button to the identify tab (at least in mobile) to bring me right to the comparision of the standard pictures of the suggested species and the observation photos, without the extra step in bringing up the whole list of AI suggestions. From there it could be the same as it is now.

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I approved this but I doubt we will make another modal pop-up over the already-open identify modal. But I do like the idea of using an individual ID as a starting point for the suggestions tab.

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3

Please. As things are i open the observation in Firefox on my phone to do that, when I feel it’s necessary to do that now instead of waiting until I get back to a computer… it’s a very makeshift and awkward way to do things, but given i also frequently want to apply annotations and unreview just-identified observations so I can find them again (eg. took ‘Plant’ to ‘daisy’ which I can confidently do narrower once I have my references available) I find it a necessary awkwardness.

4

Yes, I don’t think that a new modal popup will be nescessary, but a quick way to link/go to the comparision frame where you have both observation and standard images side by side. Especially on Android. I would appreciate if I do not need to go to the full AI suggestion box every time to do this, when I just want to compare the observation images to the species which the user as suggested.

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The current Android app won’t be updated further, aside from bug fixes. But an Identify tool in the new app is something that would be cool. Would love to add something like that eventually but it would have to be really carefully designed to reduce errors. I still make mistakes using keyboard shortcuts using the web-based Identify page, I imagine those might be compounded on mobile.

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